Reporting

In January at the World Economic Forum, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, called a nascent effort to detect artificially generated content “the most urgent task” facing the tech industry today. Now, Mr. Clegg has proposed a solution.

President Joe Biden traveled in January to North Carolina to promote his goal of affordable internet access for all Americans, but the promise for 23 million families across the US is on shaky ground. That’s because the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides $30 a month for qualifying families in most places and $75 on tribal lands, will run out of money by the end of April if Congress doesn’t extend it further. The program is key to the Biden administration’s plans to make the internet available to everyone, which the president has touted repeatedly as he has ramped up his r

Mears Broadband, a fiber network construction contractor, has launched as a standalone company just in time to support the flood of broadband deployment slated for later in 2024. For the last five years, Mears Broadband was a division of Mears Group, a subsidiary of Quanta Services that provides construction services for fiber broadband projects. CEO Trent Edwards explained the untethering will allow Mears Broadband to make decisions without impacting the 13 other companies within Mears Group.

Mobile operators will feel a financial twinge if the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is shut down this spring, but the cut won't cause extreme bleeding when it comes to subscribers, revenues and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved.

The African American Mayors Association (AAMA) has urged congressional leaders to extend funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides high-speed internet service to low-income households nationwide. The coalition issued a statement on January 25. The AAMA seeks an additional $7 billion to ensure the program’s continuation. Since its inception, the ACP has afforded high-speed internet access to more than 20 million low-income families and has positively impacted the lives of communities of color disproportionately affected by these conditions.

The city council in Los Angeles (CA) passed a motion banning “digital discrimination,” which is when internet service providers inequitably deploy high-speed internet connections or disproportionately withhold the best deals for their services from racially or socio-economically marginalized neighborhoods.The legislation, authored by Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, expanded the types of discrimination the city could investigate to include digital discrimination.

In the fall of 2020, around the height of the debate over pandemic school closures, a lawsuit in California made a serious claim: The state had failed its constitutional obligation to provide an equal education to lower-income, Black and Hispanic students, who had less access to online learning. State officials distributed more than 45,000 laptops and more than 73,000 other computing devices to students, according to court documents in the case.

Consolidated Communications is one step closer to taking its company private, as shareholders approved the proposed $3.1 billion acquisition by Searchlight Capital Partners and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI). Approximately 75% of Consolidated’s shareholders voted yes on the private equity deal, which is expected to close by the first quarter of 2025.

Broadband vendors continue to speculate on when network operators will resume spending on equipment. According to the latest data points, that might happen in 2024 but could take until 2025. For example, Calix's newest 2024 financial outlook "was significantly weaker than expected," wrote the financial analysts at Rosenblatt Securities.