Elections and Media

In the heat of the 2024 election, news influencers seemed to be everywhere.

On November 5, 2024, Donald J. Trump was elected to serve as the 47th President of the United States. The election will result in changes not just in the executive branch but in Congress as well. Even with results still coming in, we take a look at changes to the Congressional committees that oversee broadband policy, the Federal Communications Commission, and the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Even before Donald Trump was re-elected, his best-known backer, Elon Musk, had come to him with a request for his presidential transition. He wanted Trump to hire some employees from Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as top government officials — including at the Defense Department. That request, which would seed SpaceX employees into an agency that is one of its biggest customers, is a sign of the benefits that Mr.

I want to congratulate President Trump on his historic election victory. The American people have sent a clear and decisive message to Washington. It is time to change course. That is why I agree with congressional leadership that the FCC should immediately stop work on any partisan or controversial matter and focus on the transition.

Gail Slater, Sen. JD Vance’s economic policy adviser, and Michael Kratsios, Donald Trump’s chief technology officer during his first term, will head tech policy for the transition. Kratsios helped pen the Trump administration’s 2020 AI executive order, which emphasized research investment, federal computing resources, and training the U.S. AI workforce.

Of all the groups celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection, maybe no one has more of a reason to celebrate than his boosters in the tech world.

Donald Trump’s most clearly articulated economic plan is that he intends to impose a lot of tariffs on foreign-made goods entering the U.S. We can also speculate that he won’t allow tax breaks given in 2018 to lapse as they’re scheduled to do, and that Republicans will probably address taxes as one of the first items on their agenda.

When it comes to tech policy, the next Congress has a seemingly endless to-do list. It includes hashing out a deal on an elusive federal privacy law, coalescing on how to address booming products driven by artificial intelligence and countering harms on social media.

It's very likely that the incoming Trump administration will smile on satellite Internet companies such as SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon's Project Kuiper. And that could have serious implications for fiber vendors like Calix and Corning, as well as fiber network operators like AT&T, Brightspeed, Altice, Windstream and others. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is designed to funnel $42.45 billion through US states for broadband networks in rural areas.

Elon Musk—the most influential backer of President-elect Trump, thanks to his money, time and X factor—now sits at the pinnacle of power in business, government influence and global information (and misinformation) flow. As this election showed, politics and influence flow downstream from information control. Musk, once seen by many as a fool for buying Twitter, now controls the most powerful information platform for America's ruling party. X makes Fox News seem like a quaint little pamphlet in size, scope and right-wing tilt. Imagine you wanted to help mold America.