Local/Municipal

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.

Hopkins (MN) is a small town of around 19,000 residents, less than 20 miles west of Minneapolis. Compared to the surrounding suburbs, Hopkins is a different kind of community centered on a vibrant and walkable downtown. New residents face familiar challenges. How do they get connected? How do they sign up for utilities? How do they get to know what is available? How do they do all of the things that you would need to do just to live and work and play in today's society? Where are the parks? Where can they find daycare?

The Federal Communications Commission proposed new rules to ensure consistent, reasonable state and local regulations for the deployment of modern, high-speed wireline infrastructure. This rulemaking aims to cut red tape and excessive fees imposed by some state and local governments in the public rights-of-way for wireline deployments. State and local statutes, regulations, and legal requirements that prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the provision of wireline telecommunications services are unlawful under Section 253 of the Communications Act.

Forty mayors from around the world have signed onto a pact to try to shape how urban data centers are built and operated. It’s their vision for how urban data center development can be done sustainably—and not at the expense of their cities’ natural resources, energy prices or climate targets. C40 Cities, an alliance of nearly 100 cities seeking to impact climate change, launched it during London Climate Action Week.

Los Angeles Unified School District will ban classroom screen time before second grade and has enacted limited use for older students, under a pioneering policy approved by the school board that reflects growing backlash from parents and educators who are concerned about an over-reliance on computers and technology in K-12 learning. Grassroots coalitions have pushed for limits in California and nationwide as parents have become alarmed over how digital activities are replacing hands-on learning and peer interaction.

The City of Memphis’ Smart Memphis Fiber project represents one of the most innovative and consequential municipal broadband initiatives in the United States. Through a creative public-private partnership model that was approved by the City in 2024, Memphis has secured citywide fiber competition (meaning residents will have more than one high-speed internet provider to choose from) and a commitment to delivering fiber service to low-income neighborhoods.

If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling.

Digital infrastructure is no different from other public goods that we deem essential, but that aren’t universally provided by the market. Some of the most effective tools for closing these gaps over the long term come from community finance, not one-off federal grants. Connect Humanity was created for this purpose.

The New York City Public Advocate’s Office recently released an “Internet for All” Plan that, among many other things, recommends spending more than $2 billion to build a city-owned open-access municipal fiber network across the five boroughs. The Plan also suggests that the city explore ways to potentially seize infrastructure owned by a private electric utility, Con Edison, via eminent domain to support this initiative.

The wait is finally over: with nearly $20 billion in federal funding flowing to states, millions of people will get the connectivity they need. From education to healthcare, the ripple effects on our economy and daily lives will be monumental. But there’s a catch. This investment only delivers for communities that are prepared to meet it. Over the past year, Connected Nation visited some of America’s most underserved communities—from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to far West Texas—to educate, listen, and share information. The specifics varied by geography, but the pattern did not.