Amazon has been working on integrating AI with Alexa, the popular voice assistant, along with some interesting features. It will be called Alexa Plus and is rumored to cost $10 a month. The new features sound perfect for tech lovers and everyday users alike.
For years we’ve noted how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.
Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could have responded to this organic trend by offering better, cheaper, faster service. But ultimately they found it far cheaper to undermine these efforts via regulatory capture, congressional lobbying, lawsuits, protectionist state laws, and misleading disinformation.
Currently sixteen states have laws — usually ghost written by regional telecom monopolies — restrict or outright ban community broadband. Some of these laws are outright bans on community broadband, basically letting Comcast or AT&T veto your local infrastructure voting rights. Others erect elaborate, cumbersome restrictions on the financing and expansion of such networks and pretend that’s not a ban.
The good news: The Institute For Local Self Reliance (where I study and write about broadband access) notes that these sixteen laws are a notable reduction from the 21 state laws we had in 2020. What caused the change? The pandemic home education and telecommuting boom highlighted the essential nature of broadband (or more accurately, the expensive, sluggish, terrible nature of monopoly options).
As a result, several states voted to roll back the efforts and take a more serious look at community owned and operated broadband networks:
“In 2021, Arkansas and Washington passed legislation significantly rolling back legislative barriers on publicly owned broadband networks. In 2023, Colorado rolled back a law that required communities to hold a referendum vote to opt out of a state ban on municipal broadband. That law was repealed after over 120 communities across the state overwhelmingly voted to opt out of the state preemption law, fueled no doubt by the success of the municipal networks in Estes Park, Fort Collins, and Loveland. In May of 2024, Minnesota followed suit, rolling back its preemptions laws.”
There are numerous funding and deployment models when it comes to community broadband. Some municipalities build open access fiber networks themselves (see: Utah’s UTOPIA), allowing for numerous competitors. Others are built off the back of city-owned electric utilities (see: Chattanooga’s EPB). Some are fiber cooperatives (see the success had in North Dakota). Some are public private partnerships.
Data routinely shows these networks provide faster, better, cheaper service than regional cable and phone giants. Staffed and backed by locals, they tend to be more in tune with the needs of locals. They’re extremely unlikely to engage in predatory pricing, privacy, or net neutrality violations. You’ll usually enjoy local customer service. They incentivize regional monopolies to actually try.
There’s $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill subsidies that should start reaching the states early next year. A lot of this money will land in the laps of the usual regional monopolies. But a lot of it is going to wind up in the hands of local community-owned networks, which is a dramatic policy shift from years past. As a result, companies like Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have ramped up the use of fake consumer groups built specifically to mislead locals.
Community broadband isn’t some magic panacea. Like any other business model, it requires competent planning, intelligent financing, and stellar leadership. But it should be the democratic choice of a community whether to pursue such options. Not the decision of a Comcast executive living half a world away.
Microsoft is adding AI-powered text editing to Notepad. The feature, called Rewrite, is rolling out in preview to Windows Insiders and will let you use AI to “rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content,” according to the Windows Insider Blog.
If you’re a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text — for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with.
California is considering an electric-motorcycle mandate that could lead to an eight-fold growth in sales, CalMatters reports. The proposed rules, which the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the powerful regulator that sets the state's emissions standards, is set to vote on Nov. 7, would impose a credit system leading to 10% zero-emission...
My computers have been shrinking for decades. From full towers to mid, from mITX to laptops, I like my computers to take up as little space as possible while still offering decent performance. Now, thanks to mini PC development, I have a new option for my next system.
Police use of automated license-plate reader cameras is being challenged in a lawsuit alleging that the cameras enable warrantless surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The city of Norfolk, Virginia, was sued yesterday by plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm.
Norfolk, a city with about 238,000 residents, "has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program," said the complaint filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Like many other cities, Norfolk uses cameras made by the company Flock Safety. A 404 Media article said Institute for Justice lawyer Robert Frommer "told 404 Media that the lawsuit could have easily been filed in any of the more than 5,000 communities where Flock is active, but that Norfolk made sense because the Fourth Circuit of Appeals—which Norfolk is part of—recently held that persistent, warrantless drone surveillance in Baltimore is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment in a case called Beautiful Struggle v Baltimore Police Department."
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