Reporting

Amazon executives tend to describe their satellite venture, Project Kuiper, in philanthropic terms, emphasizing its potential to connect people in remote or impoverished areas with education and global commerce. Less altruistically, Amazon also hopes the $10-billion-plus project can transform it into a global telecommunications giant.

Consolidated Communications filed a letter to shareholders, asking them to vote for the company’s proposed acquisition by Searchlight Capital Partners and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI).

Masheika Allgood and Alexander Tsado left their 2020 meeting with Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang feeling frustrated. The pair had spent a year working with colleagues from across the company on a presentation meant to warn Huang of the potential dangers that artificial intelligence technology posed, especially to minorities. The 22-slide deck and other documents pointed to Nvidia’s growing role in shaping the future of AI and warned that increased regulatory scrutiny was inevitable.

TikTok staff were told they should avoid flagging potential problems on Amazon accounts to protect the video platform’s lucrative commercial relationship with the e-commerce multinational, according to internal communications seen by the Guardian. Some moderators were told in the autumn not to take negative action against a list of more than 60 Amazon-related accounts on TikTok because the US company is a heavy advertiser on the platform.

There’s a lot of optimism in the broadband industry, driven by new opportunities in rural broadband, technology advances and more. In no particular order, here are 11 important developments that we saw this year.

A middle road for AI adoption is taking shape, routing around the debate between those who fear humanity could lose control of AI and those who favor a full-speed-ahead plan to seize the technology's benefits.

Already the Federal Communications Commission’s busiest docket, the effort to restore network neutrality rules saw a rush of new comments on December 14, the deadline for initial submissions by interested parties looking to affect the outcome of the proceeding. Replies to those comments are due January 17, 2024, after which the FCC can schedule a vote on a final rulemaking. A majority of FCC Commissioners support restoring the rules by reclassifying internet access as a Title II telecommunications service subject to FCC regulation as a common carrier.

A third US Appeals Court has concluded that the Federal Communications Commission is on sound constitutional footing when it comes to delegating oversight of the billions of dollars in government advanced telecommunications subsidy money it hands out annually with a big assist from the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC). The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC is within its authority to delegate administration of those funds through a private company—USAC—because the government regulator maintains control and oversight.

When it comes to the technological advances that have graced our ever-expanding, ever-crowded, ever-exploitative prisons, observers rightly tend to point out the insidious panopticon they’ve enabled: sophisticated surveillance and security networks that ensnare the lives of nearly 2 million people locked up throughout the United States. But the technology that prisoners themselves use and depend on is frequently overlooked.

Around 1.9 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, and an estimated 45 percent of Americans have at some point experienced the incarceration of an immediate family member. For many years, prisons have largely been tech bunkers, keeping incarcerated people isolated from the world outside. But things have started to change. In some cases, they changed because prison leaders recognized the need to connect incarcerated people to their communities.