A conservative group yesterday urged the Federal Communications Commission to take licenses away from NPR and PBS stations and let other entities use the spectrum. The request came from the Center for American Rights (CAR), a nonprofit law firm that has played a prominent role in the news-distortion investigations spearheaded by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

“In the wake of the wind-down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the end of federal funding for NPR and PBS, the Center respectfully suggests that the Commission open an inquiry that looks at the future of ‘public’ broadcasting in that new environment,” a Center for American Rights filing said.

The CPB is set to shut down after Congress approved President Trump’s request to rescind its funding. The Center for American Rights said the CPB shutdown should be used as an opportunity to reassign spectrum used by NPR and PBS stations to other entities.

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Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth. I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely.

But unlike those mandatory G+ logins—on which Google eventually relented before shutting down the G+ service—our reading of the tea leaves suggests that, this time, the search giant is extremely pleased with how things are going.

Fabricated AI dreck polluting your search? It's the new normal. Miss your little results page with its ten little blue links? Too bad. They're gone now, and you can't get them back, no matter what ephemeral workarounds or temporarily functional flags or undocumented, could-fail-at-any-time URL tricks you use.

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As prominent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed to the nation's top health position Thursday, Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham sent a memo to the state's health department saying that the state "will no longer promote mass vaccination" and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns, according to a report by the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

The memo echoes directives that state health employees say they were told in October and November. In meetings at the time, employees learned of a policy shift that would end seasonal campaigns for flu, COVID-19, and mpox vaccines, but it was to be implemented discreetly and not put in writing.

According to Abraham's memo, the abandonment of lifesaving vaccination campaigns is in service of individual choice. "For many illnesses, vaccines are one tool in the toolbox of ways to combat severe illness," according to The New York Times, which also obtained a copy of the memo.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS in a move that Democrats described as an attempt to intimidate the media.

"I am writing to inform you that I have asked the FCC's Enforcement Bureau to open an investigation regarding the airing of NPR and PBS programming across your broadcast member stations," Carr wrote in a letter yesterday to the leaders of NPR and PBS.

Carr alleged that NPR and PBS are violating a federal law prohibiting noncommercial educational broadcast stations from running commercial advertisements. "I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials," Carr wrote. "In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements."

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40% of world's servers are 6 years +, drink 66% of DC energy, provide 7% of compute. Please refresh, says HPE

Four in ten of the servers currently residing in datacenters across the globe are at least six years old. Meanwhile, not only does this 40 percent slice consume 66 percent of the energy used by all bit barns – they also only provide 7 percent of the world's total compute.…

Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors.

Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers’ customer service operations are unnecessary."

Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry.

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