Devices

On July 15, 2026, Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a decision that could revive a federal grant program the President declared dead more than a year ago. In National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) v. Trump (Civil Action No. 25-3606), the court held that the Digital Equity Act of 2021 contains an unconstitutional racial classification, but that this single flaw does not doom the law.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that the Department of War has granted Conditional Approval for Gemtek Technology Co., Ltd’s WRTQ-411BE and WNRFQQ-113BE routers (terminating January 3, 2028). Such devices are therefore exempt from the Covered List. 

While there is robust literature on the negative impact of adolescent device use on physical and psychological health, there is less research on the use of technology in the presence of others and its implications for key relationships. Known as “technoference” and “phubbing,” these device-based behaviors have only recently been examined in parent-child contexts. The present study investigated adolescents' perceptions of their primary caregivers' device-centric behaviors, the emotional appraisal of that behavior, and their association with the caregiver–adolescent attachment relationship.

At the Federal Communications Commission, we’re celebrating 250 years of American independence by charting a course to ensure America’s leadership well into the future. With a packed agenda for our July 22 Open Meeting, we’re announcing a big new spectrum auction, supercharging our Space Bureau efforts, protecting consumers, and strengthening our national security. First up, we will vote on an order that adopts rules for the auction of 160 MHz of prime, mid-band spectrum in the Upper C-Band.

America has two half-connected segments and a third that is not connected at all, and the policy conversation gets all three wrong. The two half-connected segments are mirror images, each on a single network: the household with a phone and no home internet, 14.8 million strong at 11.5% of the country in the 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates, and its mirror, the household with home broadband and no cell phone, three to six million adults the industry does not track.

On Sunday, January 25, 2026, National Digital Inclusion Alliance Executive Director Angela Siefer received an email with the subject line “Help Needed in Minnesota.” By Monday morning, we were on a call with the leaders of the Hopkins Digital Access Initiative—Rebekah Crosby, Carolyn Leslie, and Beth Kivett—forging a new partnership to address urgent digital inclusion needs in Hopkins, a first-ring Minneapolis suburb, a community flooded with ICE and CPB agents.

On June 25, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a new proceeding that could fundamentally reshape—or potentially end—one of the federal government's primary tools for closing the digital divide. The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the E-Rate program asks some of the most consequential questions the program has faced in its nearly 30-year history: Has E-Rate fulfilled its mission? Should eligibility be narrowed? Should funding levels change?

Jose Flores was driving with his family to see “Toy Story 5” in Caracas, Venezuela, when a loud earthquake alert went off on his wife’s Google Android phone. Six seconds later, he felt the earth starting to shake. Venezuela does not have a national early warning system of its own, but people with Android phones received alerts from Google’s Earthquake Alerts system, which can pull data from more than two billion phones equipped with built-in accelerometers.

Finding sustainable, low-cost ways to care for the elderly population is a problem Texas is all too familiar with and Japan, home to the world’s largest over-65 population at 36 million, is beating Texas in solving. Chronic workforce shortages along with rising costs to care for a growing older population have prompted Japan—from companies to local governments—to heavily invest in technology to make it easier for family members to remotely monitor the elderly.

Congressmen Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ-5) and Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI-2) of the Select Committee on China introduced the “Cloud Security Act,” legislation to close a critical loophole in U.S. export controls on advanced artificial intelligence chips. The bill recognizes a simple but dangerous workaround: adversaries like China don’t need to buy or own a restricted AI chip if they can simply rent access to one through an American cloud computing provider. U.S.