Government & Communications

In a joint status report filed August 17, 2026, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and the U.S.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr was very firm. “As a general rule, we don’t get into any discussions that happen with the White House or don’t happen with the White House,” the Chairman told Politico’s Dasha Burns in a recent interview. While Chairman Carr may not be keen to detail his relations with the Trump administration, a trove of FCC documents—obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit 

President Donald Trump is once again expanding the frontiers of social media law. Truth Social began offering a $100,000-per-month subscription for early access to Trump’s posts in July. The Trump Media and Technology Group, Truth Social’s parent company, advertised the service as a “real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving” content.

Ask a chatbot in China about Chinese politics, and it will either clam up or echo the official Communist Party line. New studies show a surprising twist: American artificial-intelligence models are unwittingly doing the same—and researchers say AI companies haven’t done much to fix it.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including legal filings and decisions, executive orders, congressional hearings and testimony, news releases, agency decisions, and government reports, this article documents the ongoing governmental assault on disinformation research. This article assesses these activities through the historical lens of the origins of communications and media research.

Last month, we summarized the FCC's draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Maximizing Efficiencies in Universal Service Administration (WC Docket No. 26-173). The FCC adopted that item on August 6, 2026, and released the final version on August 7. The bulk of what we wrote last month still holds. This update covers what changed between the draft and the adopted item.

In December 2022, SpaceX announced the creation of Starshield, a “secured satellite network for government entities.” The network is built on the back of SpaceX’s commercial constellation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that provide broadband service under the brand name Starlink. Instead of the commercial retail broadband service that Starlink provides, Starshield aims to serve government customers to support “Earth observation,” communications, and hosted payloads.

Apparently, the Trump administration’s new guidelines for powerful artificial-intelligence tools exempt open models made by U.S. companies, a gap that marks the White House’s latest bid to ensure AI tools are safe without slowing down innovation. Under a framework that administration officials discussed with executives from leading AI companies, only makers of closed, proprietary U.S.

Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.

Updating California’s roadmap for protecting the state government from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) announced the release of an updated strategy—known as Cal-Secure 2.0—to protect the state against new online threats, including artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled cyberattacks. Building on California’s first statewide cybersecurity st