Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week I interviewed Andrew Sullivan, a veteran technologist and president and CEO of the Internet Society, the nonprofit founded by internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn that advocates for and develops the basic open internet on top of which pretty much everything else in the digital world sits. We discussed what he sees as the misguided nature of most internet regulations, why people forgot how to build a Roman arch, and what the automobile can teach us about the digital age. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows:

While cable companies can offer a converged bundle to all their customers, wireless competitors don't come even close, notes Craig Moffett

Ripple Fiber, a fiber optic internet provider based in the Southeast, is now going live in Lexington, South Carolina.

San Francisco's digital future is becoming a top issue in the 2024 race for mayor, thanks to one candidate's new platform.

A new bill that proposes to "sunset" Section 230 could work against Congress' very own goals of reining in Big Tech.

Governor Hochul unveiled application guidelines for more than $11 million in new grant programs under Empire State Development’s ConnectALL Initiative, the largest-ever investment in New York's digital infrastructure, ahead of the launch of the applications on June 17. 

Extra profits are the only explanation for many fees businesses charge.

Analyst Chris Mooney says smaller MSOs can’t generate the kind of wireless margins needed to offset losses of home internet market share to FWA

Gigapower Riding the Open Access Network Private capital is opening fiber availability outside of traditional telecom models, with th

"If we’re serious about making clean, local electricity available to everyone, everywhere, we can’t leave the utility company abuser in charge,” says John Farrell, the report's author

The digital frontier is starting to feel decidedly like 2021 all over again, fueled by crypto’s big comeback — and the return of one of our surreal, meme-powered digital landscape’s biggest characters.

Keith Gill, better known as “RoaringKitty,” announced his comeback on Sunday after more than two years of inactivity with a Reddit post showing nothing but a multimillion-dollar position in the video game retailer GameStop. It instantly breathed life back into the “meme stock” phenomenon that set Wall Street and regulators alike on their back feet in the early days of the Biden administration, creating a fiasco for the market.

Gill’s story doesn’t revolve around cutting-edge generative AI, or a sophisticated messaging campaign, or hopes for a crypto-fueled financial revolution. But if you want to know how technology can really disrupt how things work, it might just be the headline example. He’s the figurehead of a retail stock trading movement that challenged not just institutional power on Wall Street, but the market’s shared, fundamental understanding of whether or not a company is valuable.

As part of an effort to track diversity, the FCC is reinstating the collection of radio and television stations’ workforce composition data on FCC Form 395-B

Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

A new, high-speed, 100-percent fiber optic network is expanding to Camano Island in Washington, thanks to a partnership between Island County and Ziply Fiber.

Builders should think ahead and build for the connectivity demands of tomorrow, according to Scott Sampson, the CEO of Fiber Fast Homes. 

In the Show Me State, the City of Houston is nearing completion of its municipal fiber network. City officials say its "been one of the best things to come in recent years.” And while the city’s two-man operation is still in its infancy, getting to this point was no small task.

In case you haven't heard the news, T-Mobile has announced their intention to acquire most of U.S.

Keith Enright wrote in a LinkedIn post Tuesday that he will leave the company in the fall. The note comes after a series of high-profile data leaks.

'Middle Mile as a Catalyst' is a guide the outlines the critical elements for municipalities to consider when investing in middle-mile fiber:

Touting what it believes will be a ‘simpler North American’ cable company, Montreal-based Cogeco combines commercial, operational and technical functions of its telecommunications businesses

With larger providers having little economic incentive to upgrade internet infrastructure, some Western Massachusetts towns created their own municipal broadband networks, treating high speed internet as a public utility.