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Google and Facebook are working together to lay a nearly 8,000-mile cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

The fiber-optic cable will have a bandwidth of 120 terabits per second, which Google says makes it the highest-capacity route between the US and Asia. It’ll double the current record, which is held by a cable that Google is also a partner on. The new cable should allow Google and Facebook to offer faster and more reliable service to visitors on the other side of the Pacific. The companies will likely each get a certain chunk of the cable’s total capacity and lease out the remaining space to others; but so far, they haven’t announced the specifics.

Comcast's home internet data caps are going live for a majority of customers starting November 1st.

Called the "Xfinity Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan," the cap restricts the amount of data you consume in your home to 1TB per month regardless of the speed of your plan. Comcast claims 99 percent of customers use less than 1TB per month, but it does now offer an unlimited option for $50 more per month. Comcast says it will never throttle customers who go over the cap, but it will automatically add 50GB to your plan at a cost of $10. The company will continue to charge you $10 in 50GB intervals up to $200 a month. To notify customers, the company will use in-browser, email, and text notifications starting at the 50 percent point, and a usage meter is available on your online account. Comcast says customers will get two grace months every year, meaning you won't be charged unless you exceed the cap a third time in any given 12-month period.

For the next presidential debate, you'll be able to vote online for questions that could be asked of the candidates. The debate's organizers announced that they're working with the Open Debate Coalition to source questions online through the new site presidentialopenquestions.com. At the site, people can submit and vote on questions for the candidates. The top 30 questions will be eligible for consideration — although there's no guarantee that even a single question from the website will make it on air. This is the first time the Commission on Presidential Debates has considered questions submitted by online voting, and it seems to be viewing it more as an experiment than a true part of the second debate. The next presidential debate, on October 9th, will use a town hall format, with half its questions coming from "citizen participants" and half from the moderators.

The more remote someone feels, the less human they seem. This is the driving force behind large parts of what is wrong with communicating on the Internet, and it often makes talking about politics on the internet a special kind of hell. But virtual reality, theoretically, can make people on opposite sides of the globe feel like they’re talking face-to-face. And this election season, a VR social network called AltspaceVR is testing whether this feeling of connection can bring its users together during a bitterly divided campaign.

The Verge made a Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Communications Commission for complaints related to the 2016 Olympics. The grievances, 18 of which were shared in the FCC’s response, fall into three buckets: inadequate closed captioning, discrimination of non-cable subscribers, and what else, sexual indecency. The issue of NBC failing to properly handle closed captioning is a serious one, and something we intend to explore further. But the FCC complaints are largely technical, focusing on the specifics of when, where, and how long closed captioning was poorly handled or completely absent from broadcasts.

The silliest, saddest, and most political complaints pertained to the human body, and how much of it should be shown. From a viewer in New York City: "Last night 08/06/16 NBC Olympic coverage included video of naked women which was inappropriate for a the wider audience." From a viewer in Norman (OK): "NBC's coverage of the Olympic opening ceremony displayed numerous examples of people's buttocks for the viewing pleasure on my children 9 and 5. This seems highly inappropriate for a recorded program meant to be watched by a general audience."

AT&T is getting into the messy business of zero-rating, offering wireless data subscribers the opportunity to stream video from the DirecTV mobile app with no data costs at all. According to update notes from the latest version of the app, users can "stream DirecTV on your devices, anywhere — without using your data."

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion will be a major setback for Internet.org’s ambitions in sub-saharan Africa. The satellite destroyed this week, called Amos 6, was set to be used in an entirely different project. Amos 6 would have provided backhaul for Internet.org’s Express Wi-Fi system, which connects rural internet providers to the broader internet. Anyone connecting to an Express Wi-Fi provider will experience the same, full internet as anyone else, with no limitations or favored apps. As a result, it’s been able to operate even in countries that rejected Free Basics, including India. Free Basics typically focuses on areas where internet infrastructure is available, but access is too expensive for much of the population. By restricting access, Free Basics can provide more people with access to basic services, even as it runs the risk of creating a multi-tiered internet. Express Wi-Fi tackles a different problem. Instead of focusing on areas that are already connected, Express Wi-Fi looks to build out back-end infrastructure to areas too poor and remote for a conventional telecom to justify the investment. Once the backhaul connectivity is available, local entrepreneurs take on the work of bringing it to the average consumer — but it’s only possible because of the infrastructure provided by Internet.org.

[Commentary] Here are two lines from T-Mobile’s latest "Uncarrier" missive, in which the company proclaims that it has "listened to customers" and is changing its new T-Mobile One plans less than two weeks after announcing them. The first line: "Everyone gets unlimited talk, unlimited text and unlimited high-speed 4G LTE smartphone data on the fastest LTE network in America." The second line: "With T-Mobile ONE, even video is unlimited at standard definition so you can stream all you want." At this point it appears that T-Mobile is operating with definitions of "unlimited" and "data" that are are only tangentially related to reality. For example, most people understand the word "unlimited" to mean "without any limits or restrictions," but T-Mobile’s definition clearly means "without any limits except for a hard restriction on HD video that can only be lifted for $3 a day or $25 a month."*

The nonprofit group Campaign for Accountability recently launched a project to compile documents about Google's lobbying practices, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The group says the repository of documents will be a resource for monitoring how Google interacts with the government. The first installment, which the group obtained through an independent researcher, features more than 1,500 pages of emails between the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Google employees. In the email exchanges, Google employees coordinate their messaging with the White House, occasionally steering around divisions within the administration. Nothing in the documents suggests improper behavior; they are a window into Google's high-level work on policy matters, and provide a case study on how deep the company's lobbying efforts go.

WikiLeaks and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have had harsh words over Twitter’s recent decision to ban noted Breitbart editor and troll Milo Yiannopoulos. WikiLeaks’ Twitter account declared the ban an example of "cyber feudalism," saying that Twitter had "banned conservative gay libertarian [Yiannopoulos] for speaking the 'wrong' way" to Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.

According to an earlier Twitter statement, Yiannopoulos was banned for "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others" after Jones began posting examples of racist and misogynist abuse she had received on the platform. Dorsey soon replied to WikiLeaks, echoing this language. "We don't ban people for expressing their thoughts," he wrote. "Targeted abuse & inciting abuse against people however, that's not allowed." The ideal version of Twitter would in fact do what WikiLeaks suggests: build tools to let people pick who they want to communicate with, then facilitate that as openly as possible.