July: Nvidia-backed Nscale is building a £2bn data centre at Loughton in Essex, with Microsoft signed up as its anchor tenant. But it can't get the electricity to switch on, reported The Next Web: Nscale's problem is not really Nscale's. It is Britain's. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone.
"The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year," reports the BBC. "But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s." (Though Nscale and Microsoft are still working together on other projects in Norway, Portugal and America.)

But now anchor-tenant Microsoft has pulled out of the Essex deal, reports the Telegraph, adding that Microsoft's move "leaves the site in apparent limbo. The company was its only announced customer, having agreed to rent 23,000 Nvidia AI chips at the facility..." Microsoft's decision threatens to undermine Nscale's attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises.
And "our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period," Gartner wrote: "In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030," said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest...

Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. "The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced," said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.

The Verge reports: OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice?

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they're blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them....

Muse, Meta's deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its "continued access" violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI's Grok, Instinct's AI agent, and OpenAI's Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he "should start a competitor to Amazon." The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are....

Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.

More details are emerging about Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly planting a recording device in an executive conference room. Previously Alfozan "was an engineer at Meta," notes the New York Times, "before joining a start-up that went through Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator. He gained permanent residency status in the United States in 2020, according to court documents, and was hired by OpenAI in July 2025."

14 months later the conference room recording device was inserted in a USB port on the back of a television, and then concealed in toilet paper, according to a statement from America's Justice Department. (There's even a photo of a device — and a photo of Alfozan entering the executive conference room and appearing to look behind the television where the device was inserted.) The FBI's says a chatbot account associated with Alfozan's spouse showed prompts asking about installing and obfuscating a recording device. And the complaint alleges that OpenAI security personnel also found a bag Alfozan left in a different room which contained his wallet, his ID, and another recording device.

Discussions in that room included "highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research," according to the FBI, "as well as nonpublic information about Open AI's technical progress and strategic decisions..."

"If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by 3 years of supervised release."

Friday Alfozan's lawyersrequested his release from custody, saying Alfozan agrees to wear an ankle monitor, remain at home, surrender his passport and "not possess any covert audio or video recording or surveillance device." They argue that the one-way ticket he'd purchased to Saudi Arabia just continues a long-standing habit of buying one-way tickets over the years for air travel, since his tech career often involves last-minute changes to meeting schedules, and "70% of the airline bookings in his email since January 2021 (96 of 138) were one-way tickets."

His lawyers also presented 46 letters of support, including letters from former Meta colleagues, ten company founders and chief executives, and more than a dozen engineers and engineering managers.

"Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts," writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site "is upping its fight against slop." A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X and Medium and a smaller percentage on Reddit and Substack.... LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently scaled the offerings back. But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They all start to sound the same, [according to LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth Roth]. If users see too many generic AI posts, instead of content that really teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms.

In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button letting users flag when a post "seems like AI slop," which was clicked more than 1 million times within its first two weeks. Now, the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help weed out AI slop on the platform and to remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans. The company built a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have an eye for recognizing generic, sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn's AI model on what authentic, useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality, AI-generated content, it'll be less likely to be distributed beyond that user's direct connections.

Also key to the strategy is a creator management team that acts as "content therapists" for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have gotten accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, on the surface, appear to be polished posts, Roth said. "A lot of times now today, they'll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they'll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they're like, 'Why did this do badly?'" Roth said. "And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, 'Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?"

The efforts are showing early signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn's detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That's not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that "not everyone is a born communicator." But failing to edit or personalize content means it's less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.

BoingBoing reports: Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates' rise, Steve Jobs' repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date.

Though not the first InfoWorld columnist to write under the Cringely name, he was responsible for its persona and fought successfully to keep it after he left the magazine in 1995.
"I loved the man," writes Darth Technoid (Slashdot reader #83,199): I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas.

I'll miss him and his creativity greatly.
Cringely answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2000. And Cringely led an interesting life, as you can tell from Slashdot's January, 2020 story Robert Cringely Attempts an Air-Launching Space Startup: "How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?"

That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..."

He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space."
Slashdot has often linked to Cringely's commentary over the years, as far back as 1998 and as recently as this summer. ("Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations.")

• July, 1999: Cringely's take on "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
• April, 2009: Three Mile Island Memories
• June, 2011: IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
• March, 2019: Cringely's Final Predictions: Apple Becomes a Financial Service and Hedge Fund
• June, 2019: Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade
• April, 2020: Not Just 'The Death of IT'. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors
• January, 2021: Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right?
• June, 2023: Cringely Predicts Moore's Law Will Continue — Because of AI

But my favorite Cringely memory is Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the full 70-minute interview from 1995 that a 40-year-old Jobs gave to Cringely during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. ("And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope....") There's various pirated copies on YouTube and an online transcript, but only 10 minutes made the broadcast — at the time Jobs was still at NeXT after his departure from Apple. But when Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the entirety of the interview was released to theaters in 2012 six months after Steve Jobs' death.

Share your own memories of Robert Cringely in the comments...

That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI "has not been charged with foreign espionage," writes the Washington Post, "and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government."

But "there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possibility," they add, citing comments from Chris McGuire, a member of the National Security Council during the Biden administration: The Department of Justice's press release about the incident says that the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control section, whose responsibility includes prosecuting spies, is assisting with the case... A Washington-based Middle East expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid incurring wrath from Saudi Arabia, said he believed the Saudi government was almost certainly involved in some way. "No one does this, not even for patriotism, without getting paid," said the person. And money would not be distributed without agreement by the Saudi royal court, he said. The Saudis lag behind their regional rival, the United Arab Emirates, in artificial intelligence development, he added.
Friday America's Director of National Intelligence told CNBC that espionage, "both commercial espionage, and I would say state-sponsored espionage, are realities. It's something that our private sector companies need to be wary of." (And CNBC adds that"An ex-CIA official, who asked not to be named because they were discussing information that is not public, told CNBC this week that the case is 'probably the tip of the iceberg.'")

The suspect had recently said he helped advise government agencies in Saudi Arabia on technology, reports the New York Times: In an Arabic podcast interview last month, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, said he and other Saudi tech professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations, including the kingdom's social insurance agency...

"Silicon Valley is ground zero for espionage from a variety of countries around the world," said Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in national security and intelligence. She added that she was "troubled" by the OpenAI incident and expected more cases "because these companies are so important."
The Washington Post says the arrest "has ignited a fierce debate about the potential risks of Silicon Valley's international workforce — employees who often hail from nations seeking to rival the AI superpower status of the U.S." Foreign nationals have long formed the backbone of the American tech industry, helping U.S. companies surpass their would-be international rivals... As recently as April, Katrina Mulligan, a senior member of OpenAI's national security team, called for an "accelerated pathway to citizenship" for such workers, referring to foreign hires as a "national strategic asset" at an event on Capitol Hill. She estimated that a significant number of OpenAI's employees were not U.S. citizens, including Chinese nationals. Just half of the 300 top AI researchers in the world, she said, were American.

Other industry leaders — as well as some lawmakers — have long accused top-tier tech companies with many foreign workers of disadvantaging Americans and being breeding grounds for Chinese espionage. Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens. "Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft," Maguire wrote... At OpenAI on Wednesday, employees continued tense conversations about the political implications of the arrest for immigrant workers, two OpenAI employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions... The arrest triggered a discussion on OpenAI's internal Slack messaging platform among employees about whether the incident might increase pressure from the Trump administration on OpenAI to not hire foreign nationals, said one of the people.

In March, Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, wrote in court papers that AI developer Anthropic's reliance on staff with ties to China was among the concerns that fueled the Defense Department's conflict with the AI company.

Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. [...] Swarmchasers said it used the word "rogue" to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code. Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.

Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no direct opt-out for businesses that accept the terms. Ars Technica reports: As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans. "While journalism isn't the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab," the lab said.

[...] Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it's inferred from a single use of the word "train" and references to automated scraping and crawling. Meta's spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that "there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." However, should courts affirm that AI training non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta's stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.

OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT Chrome extension to let users access information from their open browser tabs. A demo video shows the new functionality in action. The Verge reports: It's also updated ChatGPT in the sidebar, with the full power of ChatGPT and your entire conversation history in Chat or Work to use without leaving the page you're viewing. It also enables ChatGPT Work to "control" your Chrome tabs for tasks like "sending messages, filling out forms, or downloading files," similar to Google's Gemini-powered "auto browse" feature, as well as organize or group open tabs.

Timekeepers have officially voted to eliminate the leap second, allowing Coordinated Universal Time to drift as much as one hour from Earth's rotation before a correction is needed. The change ends decades of occasionally adding or subtracting seconds and replaces it with a hypothetical "leap hour" that likely wouldn't be necessary for hundreds or even thousands of years. Smithsonian Magazine reports: "It's kind of a philosophical discussion, because if a leap hour happens, it won't be for a very, very long time," Christian Bizouard, director of the IERS Earth Orientation Center in France, tells the Guardian's Ian Sample. "What we are doing is pushing back the decision."

The move caps off 30 years of debate, as the leap second has been highly controversial in the world of timekeeping. Leap seconds aren't nearly as smooth of a fix as leap years are, and they can cause computer and website issues. Reddit famously crashed when a leap second was added on June 30, 2012. It's "always been a problem," Judah Levine, a former researcher at the NIST's Time and Frequency Division, tells Scientific American's Emma Gometz.

Instead of adding the entire second all at once, companies such as Google and Meta add the extra time in smaller segments in a tactic called "smearing," according to the Conversation. It's not a simple task, however, and companies that employ smearing have long lobbied to get rid of the leap second. What's more, with Earth's recent spin acceleration, timekeepers around the world were facing the possibility of the world's first negative leap second, in which a second would be subtracted from UTC. This sparked fears, akin to those surrounding Y2K, that our modern technologies wouldn't be able to handle such a change.

"It's never happened before, and therefore the software for that has never been tested," Darryl Veitch, a researcher who leads the Timing Lab at the University of Technology Sydney, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Ellen Phiddian. But others argued that it wouldn't be much of a problem. The vote means that in the future, UTC will be allowed to diverge from astronomical time more than ever before.

Tesla has unveiled a dramatically redesigned Roadster concept capable of performing midair flips, controlled landings, and a claimed 0-60 mph sprint in just 0.81 seconds. CarScoops reports: Tonight, Tesla debuted the new Roadster by driving it up a vertical ramp that then went horizontal. Then, it repeated the feat but drove off of the ramp and used thrusters to flip itself over and make a controlled landing on the ground. After that, it did a barrel roll over the rest of the Tesla lineup and again landed without issue on the ground. Then, it did 0-60 mph in 0.81 seconds according to Tesla. All of that sounds amazing, and indeed, watching it happen was pretty spectacular, but boy do we have a lot to unpack.

It's been nearly a decade since Tesla first showed us the Roadster. The company unveiled what it's simply calling the Roadster. Not Roadster 2.0, not CyberRoadster, just Roadster, as if it's a direct successor to the original Tesla. In terms of design, it's quite a bit different from the car we saw in 2017. Rather than be a somewhat curvaceous sports car, it's considerably more angular. If a Cybertruck and a Lamborghini Reventon had a runt of a baby, this would be that car. Still, at this stage, we're still just touching on what we saw and what it looks like. Let's get into the details. Developed in collaboration with SpaceX, the Roadster uses 10 cold-gas thrusters powered by two 600-liter compressed-air tanks to accelerate and maneuver in mid-air. Underbody suction fans reportedly generate up to 2Gs of downforce even while stationary, while an active rear spoiler adjusts aerodynamics in real time.

Other features include steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, and throttle-by-wire technology. Tesla plans three variants: Performance, which requires a $50,000 deposit; Thrust, a $250,000 model capable of sub-one-second acceleration; and Rocket, an invite-only, single-seat version capable of flying.

Production isn't expected until 2028, and Tesla has yet to disclose key specifications, including range, horsepower, battery capacity, and motor configuration.

A recording of the event can be viewed on X.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Flock's founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn't think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards. "If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress," Langley said, speaking onstage during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday.

During the interview, the controversial founder of the surveillance maker of license plate cameras and other recording devices deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock now faces -- which has since led to canceled contracts and even layoffs. Instead, Langley tended to respond to questions with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, and tales of the supposed numerous crimes Flock has solved, rather than offer tangible solutions to people's concerns.

In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society -- that is, one with reduced crime -- they would have to offer up their privacy in return. [...] "Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said. "Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, 'Hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.'"

[...] From Langley's answers, it's clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others. "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job," he noted. "We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies," he said. Langley went on to argue that society too often judges technology "not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect." He acknowledged that "Flock is far from perfect" but maintained that its technology helps police departments compensate for staffing shortages and improve public safety.

When pressed about potential abuse and privacy concerns, Langley offered few specifics, instead arguing that safeguards could be implemented without disrupting police operations. He insisted the benefits of what Flock offers outweigh the controversy. "There's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock," he said, adding that "it's worth it because one day they might be a victim."

Citizen Lab says it has documented the first publicly confirmed case of zero-click mercenary spyware being delivered through targeted online ads, a technique it calls "AdFection." "There has been a lot of buzz that online ads can be used to identify and automatically hack targets with pinpoint precision, but now for the first time, we have concrete technical evidence showing this process in action," said Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab. The Guardian reports: Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency. According to Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech operates a software platform called Controlium that allows its clients to "mass-profile and deanonymize" internet users then covertly hack targets with third-party spyware. Unlike infections that rely on people interacting with links or files, the spyware requires no interaction from the victim to be installed, making it a new delivery technique, Citizen Lab says. The infections happen without a user's knowledge, and in a matter of seconds, according to Citizen Lab.

"[The online advertising] ecosystem is being weaponized at a massive scale to profile millions of users, then silently infect targets with zero-click mercenary spyware," the report says. According to the report, Controlium is able to harvest a user's identity and IP address when the user is shown a seemingly benign custom-created ad -- for example, for a digital game or a telecoms service. If the user has been selected as a target for hacking, a mercenary spyware firm can then send a malicious code containing spyware to their device, the researchers say. They say that millions of users worldwide have been served ads by Discover-Tech since 2024, including in Yemen, Brazil, Mexico and Czechia. [...] The full extent of the targeting allegedly enabled by Discover-Tech is unknown. Citizen Lab's findings join mounting evidence that the opaque arrangements underpinning the world of online advertising can be leveraged for surveillance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Schools and libraries from around the U.S. pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to drop the idea of ending E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year program that connects students and library visitors to the Internet. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has criticized school districts for having "experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students," and said E-Rate expanded too far beyond its original purpose of "supporting basic Internet access to schools and libraries for educational purposes." In June, Carr led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking public comment on whether E-Rate should be "limited or sunset to reflect today's extensive connectivity rates."

Carr's proposal could result in E-Rate cutting the discounts that schools and libraries receive for telecom services and equipment, and imposing more restrictions on how E-Rate money can be used. The FCC seeking comment on whether to sunset the program also raises the possibility that Carr might choose to axe E-Rate entirely. The National Association of Elementary School Principals told the FCC that it "strongly supports the continued operation of the E-Rate program and urges the Commission to reject proposals that would eliminate, substantially restrict, or impose new conditions on this essential source of connectivity assistance for schools and libraries." The Carr FCC already scaled E-Rate back last year by ending funding for schools and libraries to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and for Wi-Fi service on school buses. "Importantly, the FCC does not have the authority to terminate the E-Rate program. The E-Rate program is mandated by Congress, and the FCC is responsible for administering it," the American Library Associated told the FCC.

The American Library Association said "the FCC lacks the authority and expertise to regulate screen time or determine educational outcomes." In a filing, the group pointed out that under U.S. law, determinations about what content is inappropriate for children "shall be made by the school board, local educational agency, library, or other authority responsible for making the determination."

A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade as governments and companies migrate workloads and rewrite software. The figure is more than six times the European Commission's upper estimate. However, roughly 80 billion euros ($89 billion) of it comes from a modeled scenario assuming sovereignty rules are extended to 25% of cloud workloads in essential private-sector industries.The Register reports: The report specifically targets Article 31 of the proposed legislation, which it says could allow the Commission to extend sovereignty requirements into essential private-sector services. CCIA argues that forcing businesses to move away from existing cloud infrastructure could trigger expensive software redevelopment projects, with code rewriting and re-architecting accounting for 69 percent of its estimated costs.

Luxembourg would apparently take the biggest hit, with the study putting the cost at 1,711 euros per worker over ten years. Denmark (905 euros), Austria (900 euros), and Finland (864 euros) also face hefty bills, as does Ireland (856 euros), which hosts the European headquarters of several US tech giants. CCIA is urging EU governments to overhaul the proposed legislation, limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads, and abandon requirements based on corporate origin or personnel nationality in favor of what it calls risk-based technical safeguards.

"Member States cannot rely on the Commission's incomplete estimates when deciding CADA's strict sovereignty requirements for cloud and AI providers," said Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA Europe's policy manager. "Taxpayers and businesses will foot the bill, yet the official assessment missed 70 percent of CADA's true impact." For AWS and Google, offering European customers greater control over their data also helps retain business that might otherwise migrate to European competitors. It's a rather convenient arrangement: sell customers sovereignty on one hand, while an industry association representing your interests warns governments against imposing too much of it on the other.