Digital Content

By the end August 2023, adult content will get a lot harder to watch in Texas. Instead of clicking a button or entering a date of birth to access adult sites, users will need to provide photos of their official government-issued ID or use a third-party service to verify their age. It’s the result of a new law passed earlier in summer 2023 intended to prevent kids from seeing adult content online.

In 20218 more than 40 million people in the United States were living with a disability, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, even as majorities of these Americans report having certain technologies, the digital divide between those who have a disability and those who do not remains:

The internet is beginning to fill up with more and more content generated by artificial intelligence rather than human beings, posing weird new dangers both to human society and to the AI programs themselves. Experts estimate that AI-generated content 

As wildfires ravage western Canada, Canadians can’t read the news about them on Facebook or Instagram.

T-Mobile announced to its employees that it is planning to reduce its workforce by about 7%, which equates to about 5,000 jobs. In a letter sent to employees, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert wrote that the cuts will impact employees in locations across the country, primarily in corporate and back-office, and some technology roles. This round of cuts will not affect retail and consumer care employees. “After this process is complete, I do not envision any additional widespread company reductions again in the foreseeable future,” wrote Sievert.

As adoption of generative AI grows, providers are hoping that greater transparency about how they do and don't use customers' data will increase those clients' trust in the technology. There's a mad 

Leading media organizations are issuing guidance on leveraging artificial intelligence in the newsroom at the same time they're making licensing deals to let AI firms use their content to train AI models.

A group of prominent media, tech and research executives have raised nearly $3 million to launch an independent policy research center focused on addressing global internet issues, such as disinformation, algorithmic accountability, and the economic health of the news industry. While the Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) is not designed to lobby or advocate on behalf of specific policy proposals, it does hope to influence future internet policy toward maintaining an open internet and an independent press.

At the end of July 2023, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a $20 million penalty against Q Link and Hello Mobile for not complying with the Customer Propriety Network Information (CPNI). The FCC concluded that the two companies violated the CPNI rules when they failed to protect confidential user data. The companies both had security flaws in their apps that allowed outside access to customer account information. There are stringent privacy rules in place at the FCC for voice providers, but nothing similar for broadband.

Telecommunications executives are looking at booming broadband use largely driven by video. Streaming video is one of – if not the main reason – for the explosion in data use across networks in the past 10 years, and platforms like Netflix are some of the main culprits. That amount of streaming across the globe is leading to big infrastructure costs for internet and mobile broadband providers, at a time when customers are used to large or unlimited downloads at a low price and are unwilling to pay much more.