from the what-third-branch? dept

There are many ways to describe the Trump Era, but the executive branch’s conviction that it can simply ignore the legislative branch’s entire existence has become something close to a governing principle. From impounding funds designated by Congress to launching a war without Congress’s authority, Trump has basically decided that the legislative branch is a vestigial organ of the federal government.

This latest one may seem smaller than those stories, but it’s another demonstration of how little the executive branch thinks the laws Congress wrote actually matter. Specifically in this case, the FCC has voted to scrap the congressionally-mandated limits on broadcast TV ownership. This, despite a long list of people who’d normally be on Carr’s side — Republican members of Congress, the former FCC commissioner who helped negotiate the cap in the first place, the House Majority Leader who cut the final deal — all saying the FCC can’t do this. Even Ted Cruz says he’s skeptical.

But Carr has done it anyway.

And while I’m sure the usual coterie of MAGA Trump defenders will insist this is all fine, it’s obviously an end-run around Congress’s authority. Congress set that number itself, writing directly into statute that no single company may own stations reaching more than 39% of American households. It was in a 2004 appropriations bill that raised this limit from the previous 35% to 39%.

That’s Congress clearly putting into law that the FCC must have a cap of 39% reach for TV ownership.

But Brendan Carr says he can change this because it’s “outdated.” Here’s how Carr previewed the vote last month in an oped for Breitbart:

On August 6, the FCC will vote on eliminating the outdated national cap in favor of a new case-by-case approach. Previously, the cap operated as a blanket prohibition on any and all deals that would combine stations in excess of the 39 percent limit—regardless of whether it was a good deal or a bad one for the country. Our new proposal would allow the FCC to approve deals that exceed the 39 percent cap, but only if doing so would promote the public interest.

Even if you agree with Carr that the 39% ownership cap is “outdated” and that it’s not in the public interest, that’s not Carr’s decision to make.

He is saying, out loud, that the FCC can ignore an act of Congress whenever the FCC decides that act has gotten stale — with the FCC, conveniently, being the sole judge of staleness.

Of course, all this comes right after Nexstar and Tegna — two giant, reliably GOP-friendly broadcast companies — merged into something massively exceeding that 39% cap (thanks to Carr’s support). You know full well (as does Carr) that if the two companies merging here were the kind he likes to call “leftist” or “woke,” there is no chance he’d wave them past the 39% cap. He’d suddenly put on his attempt at a solemn face and talk about how unfair it would be to the public interest of America to let one company control that much broadcast spectrum.

The lone remaining Democrat on the Commission, Anna Gomez (who Trump likely hasn’t fired yet only because the FCC needs a quorum to do anything at all), has pointed out that this is all quite obviously unlawful.

Today’s decision to eliminate the 39 percent national audience reach cap is unlawful on its face and a profound departure from both statutory boundaries and longstanding broadcast policy. Congress set this cap in federal law, and only Congress can change it. I cannot support an action that so plainly exceeds the Commission’s authority while simultaneously overlooking the real-world consequences for the public we serve.

She goes into further detail about how the wording in the Telecommunications Act is pretty clear that the FCC can’t just ignore this cap or change it without congressional approval. And cites a bunch of Republicans including former FCC officials, along with both current and former elected officials in Congress:

Further, knowledgeable republicans with direct experience shaping, and later interpreting, the national audience reach cap agree that today’s action is plainly foreclosed by law. Former FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, who was personally involved in the negotiations that produced the 39 percent cap, has stated unequivocally that the Commission ‘does not have the authority to modify the national audience reach cap,’ explaining that Congress expressly codified the cap in statute, removed it from the Commission’s periodic ownership review, and never revisited that limitation. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who negotiated the final compromise with Senator Ted Stevens, has likewise emphasized that the 39 percent cap was deliberately enacted to prevent FCC revision absent a future act of Congress, underscoring that ‘regulatory agencies cannot defy or modify laws enacted by Congress’ and reaffirming that the cap is ‘a statute, not a suggestion.’ And while Senator Ted Cruz did not serve in Congress during those negotiations, his present role as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee gives him direct oversight over this very issue. He has made clear that he is ‘skeptical a change can be made absent an act of Congress,’ signaling that Congress’s intent remains unchanged today. Taken together, these perspectives from the architects of the cap, the regulators who implemented it, and the congressional leaders who now oversee it underscore a bipartisan, durable, and deeply informed consensus that the law prohibits the Commission from eliminating the national audience reach cap. No amount of policy preference can substitute for statutory authority

Gomez also points out that if Carr were actually concerned about the public interest in these deals, the FCC sure has a funny way of showing it. For all of Carr’s talk about weighing the public interest deal by deal, his Media Bureau has refused, every single time, to look at what these mergers actually do to the public — specifically, what they do to the retransmission fees that show up on your cable bill:

What is notable about such reviews is the studied avoidance thus far of addressing the impact of the transaction at issue on retransmission consent fees on the merits every single time it is raised. The Media Bureau routinely summarily dismisses such issues as outside the scope of what it should be considering. For example, in the Nexstar Tegna decision, despite evidence that the transaction would result in millions of dollars in increased fees on consumers, the Media Bureau determined that it was inappropriate to consider the issue in that “case-by-case” review because “allegations regarding retransmission consent do not raise a substantial and material question of fact as to whether grant of the Applications would serve the public interest” and such questions should be considered in a rulemaking proceeding. Clearly the Commission does not want to address the challenging questions retransmission consent raises, but passing the buck to another proceeding when the impact is significant, direct, and current can only go so far without becoming the very essence of arbitrary and capricious. The Commission has crossed that line here. This is indefensible.

It’s almost certain that a lawsuit will be filed challenging this unilateral move by the FCC to simply rewrite congressional law. But either way, this shows (yet again) how the current administration sees Congress’s role as entirely ceremonial. At least when a Republican is president. The second that a Democrat is back in the White House you can absolutely guarantee that partisan dipshits like Carr will suddenly rediscover the need for Congress to set all the rules.

After all, when Biden was in office, Carr was one of the most vocal in pointing out that Congress limits the FCC’s authority and you can’t just ignore Congress. Here he is complaining about the FCC pretending it has “freewheeling authority” to ignore Congress:

Today’s NPRM appears to me to be part and parcel of that broader effort, which I cannot support. It relies on Section 616(a) of the Communications Act, which lists six very specific things the FCC can regulate in MVPD carriage agreements. That list provides a good clue of how Congress intended to circumscribe our statutory authority. But the NPRM asserts that we may go beyond that list and exercise freewheeling authority over private carriage agreements. I am dubious.

Huh. How odd. In that same dissent he says that the FCC must wait for Congress to act:

Unless and until Congress decides to delegate additional authority to the FCC over OTT streaming, we should act with the appropriate dose of regulatory humility.

What happened to that regulatory humility, Brendan?

Or how about his concerns about Congress when he dissented from the Biden FCC’s attempt to deal with digital discrimination? Back then, he was super duper concerned that Congress had not approved this.

Needless to say, Congress never contemplated the sweeping regulatory regime that President Biden asked the FCC to adopt—let alone authorized the agency to implement it. Nonetheless, the FCC is voting to put President Biden’s plan in place. I oppose the plan for several reasons.

In that dissent, he’s clear about not going beyond congressional authority:

Of course, Congress did not give the FCC the power to do any of this—the agency just creates it out of whole cloth.

But now that Trump is in charge, Carr is happy to erase a rule Congress wrote and to replace it with his own judgment.

Oh, and when the Biden administration’s FCC tried to bring back net neutrality? You sure know that Brendan Carr was furious that they would ignore the will of Congress. Indeed, he used that to whine about Chevron deference, allowing agencies like the FCC to ignore the will of Congress. But, of course, the Supreme Court got rid of Chevron deference in Loper Bright, a decision Carr celebrated. But before that, in dissenting from the FCC’s moves on net neutrality he went on an extended rant about how the FCC should require explicit consent from Congress:

Congress never passed a law saying that the Internet should be heavily regulated like a utility, nor did it pass one giving the FCC authority to make that monumental determination. The Executive Branch pressured the agency into claiming a power that remained—and remains—with the Legislative Branch.

Gosh. It’s almost as if Brendan Carr thinks that when Democrats are in power, the FCC should be limited in what it can do by Congress, and when Republicans are in power, Congress is entirely there for show.

For the past decade, the central project of the conservative legal movement has been convincing courts that federal agencies constantly grab powers Congress never handed them. That’s what West Virginia v. EPA was about. That’s what Loper Bright was about. The entire premise of the major questions doctrine is that when an agency makes a decision of real economic and political significance, it had better be able to point to clear authorization from Congress.

Carr cannot point to clear authorization from Congress on this. He can point to the precise opposite: a specific number, written into a specific statute, after a specific fight, for the specific purpose of taking this decision away from the FCC. He isn’t stretching an ambiguous grant of authority. There’s nothing here to stretch. He’s crossing out a figure Congress chose and penciling in “whatever I think is good for the country.”

And he’s replaced it with a process where he is the judge. Deals get approved if they “promote the public interest,” with Carr deciding what that means, deal by deal, with no cap, no standard, and (as Gomez points out) a Media Bureau that refuses to look at the one concrete public harm anyone actually raises.

Remember when Carr set up his “delete, delete, delete docket” in which he promised to delete unnecessary “regulatory underbrush”? This is the opposite. It’s the FCC chair converting a bright-line rule Congress wrote into a regulatory permission slip he personally issues. Companies that want to get very large now have an obvious incentive to make sure Carr is happy with them, which is presumably the feature rather than the bug. 2023 Brendan Carr would be livid.

Maybe 39% is the wrong number in 2026. That’s an argument someone could make honestly. There’s even a body specifically designed to hear it, weigh it, and write a new number into law if it’s persuaded. It meets a few blocks from the FCC. Carr, with Trump in the White House, would rather pretend it isn’t there.

Filed Under: anna gomez, brendan carr, congress, fcc, media ownership

from the when-all-you-have-is-a-dragnet dept

Well, it looks like investigators better go back to doing actual investigations in the Fifth Circuit, rather than just assuming a little paperwork and a whole lot of assistance from service providers is going to do their work for them. For at least the second time in the same state (Mississippi), federal judges have rejected cell tower dump warrants, ruling that these warrants (obviously) cannot hope to meet the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements.

The first time this happened was early last year, when a magistrate judge rejected four successive cell tower dump warrants submitted by the FBI. The magistrate was the first level of review in this case. The latest involves the second level of review by a federal circuit judge (h/t Josh Gerstein). This decision does nothing more than affirm the magistrate judge’s rejection of these cell tower dump warrants. (Another rejection of cell tower dump warrants occurred in Nevada roughly six weeks after this one, but that’s in a different circuit so it’s up to the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court to establish this precedent.)

But the origin of these successive rejections goes back a bit further. Bucking its own anything-for-the-cops tendencies, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court delivered a ruling in August 2024 that said geofence warrants were unconstitutional. That decision relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter ruling — the one that said long-term location tracking (via cell site location info) was unconstitutional.

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court used the Supreme Court’s Carpenter reasoning to move location info out from under the protection of the Third Party Doctrine. More specifically, it had problems with geofence warrants — warrants that force Google to search everyone’s location records before handing law enforcement a list of probables based on whatever time/date/location restrictions investigators give it.

Turning everyone into a suspect just because investigators don’t actually know who they’re looking for makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment’s demands for particularity. The government likes to believe that the only particularity needed is the distinct probability that Google stores the location records they’re asking for.

That’s not enough. So, in the Fifth Circuit, precedent says geofence warrants are more likely than not to be rejected for a lack of particularity. This probably explains why the FBI decided to roll its dragnet back to the previous version: the cell tower dump. Rather than ask Google for location data, the investigators asked every cell service provider in the areas where crimes were committed to “dump” all connection records fitting those search limitations. As each warrant was rejected by the magistrate, the FBI made further alterations in hopes of having a warrant approved. But even specifying that the dumps only include cell numbers with multiple hits couldn’t save them.

Here’s how the magistrate judge delivered the news to the FBI last March:

[W]hile the Government has some idea of who may have been involved in one or more of the crimes—the affidavits supporting the warrant applications list seven potential suspects—the Government has not presented probable cause to believe that any particular individual committed any of the specific crimes described. The warrant applications also arguably present probable cause to believe that the searches will reveal the location data of some unknown perpetrators of the crimes. See Mem. at 3 (explaining that affidavits describe “the belief that the cell towers will contain evidence of [who committed] the offenses”). But this is not enough. If the Court were to issue the warrants, it would be authorizing the Government to search the data for every cellular device (including cell phones) of every single individual near the crime scenes without a showing of probable cause as to each individual.

More succinctly (and pithily), here’s why cell tower dumps (and geofence warrants) are unconstitutional:

Stated another way, the Government is essentially asking the Court to allow it access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.

As stated above (scroll back a bit because I’m terrible at writing short lead-ins), this new ruling [PDF] presents a final rejection for these cell tower dump warrants. The government can always appeal a magistrate’s warrant rejections, but appealing past this point puts the government back into the Fifth Circuit queue. And if the Fifth Circuit said geofence warrants (which are just a different haystack) are unconstitutional, it’s highly unlikely it will give cell tower dumps a pass.

This decision starts off with a nod to history before immediately bringing everything up to date:

Such intrusions would have been unthinkable to those 55 men gathered in Philadelphia in 1787. Therein lies the problem—the technological resources at the government’s disposal unlock efficient and effective ways to solve crime in the twenty-first century, but they also expose individuals’ whereabouts at all times, including in sensitive places. The government now has the capacity to identify any individual with a cell phone, at any public or private location.

That sort of “efficiency” needs to be checked (as in “checks and balances”). That’s why we have courts. And this court is willing to do what many won’t: refuse to bless constant expansion of government power and information access just because today’s everyone-voluntarily-carries-a-tracking-device reality could not possibly have been foreseen when the Fourth Amendment was put into play.

The government tried to argue that cell tower dumps do not “track” people’s locations like the historical CSLI (cell site location info) at the center of the Supreme Court’s Carpenter ruling. The court says that’s not the point, especially not when the Supreme Court’s ruling is considered in conjunction with the Fifth Circuit’s rejection of geofence warrants.

[T]he Fifth Circuit has recognized that “the potential intrusiveness of even a snapshot of precise location data should not be understated.” Smith, 110 F.4th at 833. See also Chatrie, 146 S. Ct. at 2209-12 (discussing how the length of the search does not determine whether a search occurred). Though tower dumps provide more limited, less-detailed information than geofencing, the inherent nature of this type of search remains corrosive to individuals’ privacy interests.

Furthermore, the government tends to ignore how the Fourth Amendment has been defined since its inception. While the government would prefer its definition of particularity to be limited to “we have probable cause to believe the place searched will contain what’s being searched for” (which is how the government portrays both geofence and tower dump warrants), the courts have long understood the particularity requirement to mean this when it comes to probable cause:

“Probable cause is not a high bar.” District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48, 57 (2018) (quotation marks and citation omitted). The Government only needs to show that “there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.” Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 235, 238 (1983).

Cell service provider tower records are neither “contraband” nor “evidence of a crime.” They may help investigators produce a list of probable suspects, but that is not the same thing as contraband or evidence.

Summing everything up, the federal court rejects every one of these warrants and makes it clear the government will need to do something other than ask tech companies and service providers to generate lists of suspects for it — especially when doing so means turning thousands of people into possible suspects just because they happened to be near certain cell towers when crimes were committed.

Law enforcement benefits from tower dumps, as evidenced by recent cases, and this decision may thwart certain criminal investigations. But the gentlemen in Philadelphia knew the Fourth Amendment’s protections would come with costs. The cost to law enforcement is the price we pay to be free from arbitrary Government intrusion into our everyday movements.

It’s that last sentence that’s going to piss off the government the most. All levels of law enforcement seem to believe it’s the public who should be making all the sacrifices when it comes to law enforcement efficiency. This ruling sets the record straight. And if the government wants to take another run at the Fifth Circuit, it certainly can. Given what it’s seen so far, it would probably be better if it didn’t.

Filed Under: 3rd party doctrine, 4th amendment, 5th circuit, cell tower dumps, mississippi, phone records, surveillance

A decade ago, Google introduced voice typing with the Gboard app on Android, and a year later, the perk landed on iPhones with the keyboard app. I never paid much attention to it. The biggest reason was that it was just not accurate. 

The big promise was a whole new way of interacting with our phones, but it was never good enough to make me quit tapping, or swiping on an on-screen keyboard. Fast forward to 2026, I’m talking to my computer. In fact, this whole article was dictated and copy-pasted in WordPress. 

The modifications that I had to make were inserting a few commas, breaking a couple of sentences with a full stop, and turning a few bullet points into a coherent sentence. If I were to put a number on it, I would say just 2% of the effort that went into writing this article was dedicated to tapping on the keyboard to make the aforementioned changes.

That’s all. But the honeymoon phase comes to an end pretty soon as social realizations dawn upon you.

A flying start

I first started using voice dictation after trying Wispr Flow. It’s eerily accurate. And when I say eerily accurate, I mean it as a person whose first language is not English, nor do I have a distinct American or British accent. And yet, every time I write an article, I am amazed by just how accurate and convenient the whole experience is. 

It has also made me unbelievably lazy and far more productive at the same time. 

I run a newsroom, and that means being fast is the only path to the reward that is a high ranking and visibility in Google search. In fact, it was the first lesson that I was taught when I started journalism in one of India’s most respected newsrooms. “Speed is of the essence.” That’s what my first editor used to say and almost drilled it into my workflow. 

I have religiously followed that mantra. But ever since I started using Wispr Flow, I have been amazed by how fast I can now write and publish breaking news stories. Last night I was able to compose a story worth around 500 words in less than six minutes. I could have gone faster if English were my mother tongue, but six minutes is still an outrageously fast pace by modern standards. 

This mind-bending convenience has also made me utterly lazy. Every single time I have to touch the keyboard to do something that cannot be accomplished by voice typing, I feel a distinct struggle. I thought, maybe, it was the chiclet keyboard on my laptop that had finally outlived its charm. 

To test the theory, I tried a low-profile keyboard and then switched to a mechanical keyboard in hopes that it would ignite my love for typing. I was delusional. There was nothing wrong with the keyboards either. If it were a short burst of typing chores, I would have decisively enjoyed the creamy sound and the tactile experience. I have just become hopelessly addicted to narrating my articles and rambling my way through my daily newsroom duties. 

The prophecy came true

Is this the future of computing? It seems like it. It’s still not perfect. Voice typing is still tailored for jobs where you are either writing long drafts or just prompting your way through tasks using an AI agent like ChatGPT or Gemini. Silicon Valley is utterly sold on the idea, and it has even given rise to a term called “voice-pilled.”

Unfortunately, I count myself as one of those voice-pilled converts. 

Every time I run into this conundrum, I go back to one of the notes that Bill Gates shared back in 2023. “You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do,” he wrote, exactly a year after ChatGPT was released publicly for the first time and created a new computing revolution. 

In May last year, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, sat for an interview with Sequoia and dropped a prescient take on voice as the new frontier for human-computer interactions. This was his quote:  

“I think voice is extremely important. Honestly, we have not made a good enough voice product yet. That’s fine. Like, it took us a while to make a good enough text model, too. We will crack that code eventually, and when we do, I think a lot of people are going to want to use voice interaction a lot more.” 

This was around the same time when Wispr Flow had just started making waves. I gave it my first serious try when it landed on iPhones, and later installed it on my Mac. Yes, the dictation limit on free accounts was a tad frustrating, so I briefly experimented with a paid subscription. 

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Eventually, I canceled the subscription and started using the Android app, which offers unlimited voice dictation for free accounts as a limited-time offer. A few weeks ago, I shifted to Willow Voice, which is nearly as accurate and absolutely free. I haven’t looked back since. 

My humanity and the world’s unease

Typing continues to feel tedious, and despite some of the annoying typos due to my accent issues, I still find myself long-pressing the fn button to just narrate my articles, compose long messages to teammates, or even just my usual back-and-forth with Claude for pet projects. 

It’s just liberating, and at the same time, it frustrates me every time I go back to a task that requires manual work on the keyboard.  

This is also where the situation gets a tad embarrassing for me. It doesn’t matter whether you work in an office space or you are one of those people who carry a laptop to a nearby cafe for your daily work. If you are someone who stares at your laptop’s screen and keeps talking for long spells, it just feels weird. 

Now the ubiquity of wireless earbuds makes the situation just a tad less embarrassing. AirPods have made it a natural sight to see people just walking around and talking to themselves, while the onboard mic on the earbud captures and transmits whatever it is that they are speaking. But talking to a person and a computer are two entirely different things. 

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When you talk to a person, there is usually a sense of friendliness, humility, and, most importantly, human emotions involved. When you’re talking to a friend on a phone call, you don’t feel uneasy. If you took the call in a public place, it has just become a part of our normal lives to talk without holding the phone close to our ears. 

But when you are talking to a computer, there are no emotions involved. You sound robotic and use words that you would ordinarily not speak when talking to a human being. It’s just a set of instructions, but AI models these days are smart enough to turn those incoherent sentences into something meaningful and proceed with them as commands.

We think the tools people run their business on are all heading voice-first.

One founder we came across is already there. He talks instead of typing for almost everything, and the rest of his day moves around that.

What are the tools you could not work without? pic.twitter.com/bupBikudcL

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— Willow (@WillowVoiceAI) August 3, 2026

I feel conscious every time I start narrating an article or a message. “Why is this guy suddenly talking about Anthropic’s AI model going rogue and hacking third-party services?” “Why is he rambling about Google fixing a Bluetooth bug on its Pixel phones?” “Why is this guy randomly and intermittently speaking about following Apple’s UI design rules?”

All the above situations are a part of my daily job, and I am not embarrassed about doing my job. I love it. And yet, every time I use voice narration in a co-working space, a library, or my nearby coffee shop, I am afraid that the person next to me is having those thoughts about me. 

Maybe, I just need to muster some courage?

Yes, the world doesn’t care or know who I am. A random stranger shouldn’t pay attention to what I do with my computer, either. But the social norms and how human awareness works make me feel uneasy every time I start talking to my computer.  

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It’s 12:42 AM right now. I am narrating this article using Willow Voice, and I’m still concerned that my neighbor upstairs, or in the next apartment, is going to hear me randomly talking about voice dictation in the middle of the night. I enjoy the perk and how I have been able to draft this article in less than 15 minutes.

I still feel a sense of unease every time I summon these unnaturally accurate and efficient voice dictation tools on my computer. I fear I will only get used to it when the whole world gets voice-pilled at their jobs. For now, I will keep my computer talks limited to cozy apartments with the windows shut.

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Our fun links this week are the Nintendo gameplay counsellors and a revamped app for sharing your toilet flushing habits. 

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

Filed Under: content moderation, india, trust and safety

Companies: ebay, meta, telegram, tiktok

The history of networking is full of tools that repurposed solutions to very different kinds of problems first. Wi-Fi’s origins trace back, in part, to a team of Australian radio astronomers trying to detect signals from evaporating black holes. But the data-processing tools they’d developed also proved capable at extracting clean messages from any chaotic, echoing signal environment. Echoes are echoes, after all, whether from distant star systems or from the far corner of the house.

I research vehicle communications networks, connecting cars to cars and to transportation infrastructure like traffic lights—for tomorrow’s vehicle-to-everthing (V2X) networks.

V2X research has long relied on models that assume “perfect” or “ideal” network conditions, which is a simplifying assumption that makes the math tractable. But this assumption doesn’t reflect how real wireless signals behave in a moving, obstructed, high-density environment. That gap is exactly the kind of real-world unpredictability that open radio access networks (a.k.a. O-RAN)—an open, programmable architecture behind some 4G and 5G cellular networks—were built to manage.

So why has the O-RAN standard—which is open and available to be applied well beyond 5G telecom—never been used for vehicle communications?

Solutions to the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) problem have to date relied on new networking protocols built from scratch—only to discover chicken-and-egg problems, thorny standards wars, and real signal congestion challenges at scale.

By contrast, O-RAN allows V2X engineers to reuse the networking protocols already developed for cellular communications. O-RAN was developed assuming cellphone towers are generally fixed in place. But, as can be seen below, O-RAN accommodates mobile “towers”—cars and trucks, in this case—with little additional effort.

Imagining a New Way to Connect Vehicles

Self-driving vehicle technology has largely been an each-car-for-itself endeavor. Tesla’s approach, for instance, relies heavily on powerful on-board banks of computers and suites of sensors spread around the car.

However, as an alternative to the “data center on wheels” model, this new O-RAN approach to V2X relies on each car’s nearby neighbors, wherever they are on the road. Each O-RAN–connected vehicle can then use a diversity of cars’ sensors and viewing angles for better group coordination and decision-making.

There is, to be clear, no O-RAN V2X test network operating in the world. Not yet.

It was just 10 years ago that the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released its initial cellular V2X standard. The 3GPP have refined V2X over three major releases since. In the U.S. and the EU, the FCC and related European agencies have put forward other standards for short-range wireless V2X communication protocols.

However, no consensus standard has yet emerged. So, lacking any clear, unambiguous guidance on the future of V2X networks, autonomous-car makers—like Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, and Cruise—have leaned more on self-reliance, bulking up each vehicle with as many sensors and GPUs as possible.

Here, though, is where O-RAN might be able to help.

A little like APIs (a.k.a. application program interfaces) connect one app to another on your smartphone, O-RAN serves as an API for the network itself. And because of O-RAN’s open standards, a wireless network becomes programmable, vendor-neutral, and open to custom applications called xApps.

To test our proof-of-concept framework, I have been part of a team simulating five minutes of O-RAN V2X network traffic over one square kilometer of urban area, using real buildings and real-world road layouts from OpenStreetMap and traffic patterns generated by the modeling package SUMO. The simulations assumed a traffic density of 50-70 vehicles per kilometer—not rush hour but not light traffic either. In our simulation, we assumed vehicles communicated via a millimeter-wave frequency of 28 gigahertz and that each component of our O-RAN V2X system had its own dedicated xApp.

Taken together, these inputs—real geometry, real traffic, and each vehicle’s live GPS position—constitute what network researchers call a digital twin of the urban environment. That’s a virtual replica detailed enough for the network to reason about the physical world in real time.

This virtual world gave us a real result, too.

The simulations, published recently in IEEE Network, revealed that existing V2X standards—in which cars uncoordinatedly spit out messages into the network—result in signals “talking” over each other some 80-100 percent of the time. However, using O-RAN signal coordination, the message “collision” rate dropped to near zero.

And that matters because a seized-up V2X network doesn’t just fail quietly. It can fail in ways that might make a road turn treacherous.

How O-RAN Can Coordinate V2X Traffic

High-frequency data links between cars are already difficult to maintain, even on a clear day with no buildings or city infrastructure getting in the way.

Yet, in this situation, existing V2X networks leave a car to conduct blind searches for each dropped signal beam. Traveling at highway speeds, that search takes long enough for the surrounding world to change completely.

An O-RAN network continuously tracks signal conditions across the network, and in O-RAN V2X simulations, we also gave the network access to a detailed map of the urban environment—building positions, road geometry, intersection layouts—combined with each vehicle’s GPS trajectory. Together, these parameters let the network’s control layer predict where and when a signal link is about to fail and instruct each car’s antenna to adjust before the connection drops.

Signal pointing is one failure mode. Losing the connection entirely—because no direct path exists at all—is another.

Consider, for instance, a crossroads of two busy streets, with a few alleys and parking lots adding to the list of potential dangers.

If a signal from car A cannot reach car B directly, or if the path length is too far for an individual beam to travel, the signal must find an intermediary car or stationary sensor nearby that can pass along the message. And existing V2X standards are slow and reactive—polling potential relay vehicles one-by-one: Are you available? Can you redirect this message?

By contrast, O-RAN keeps a running graph of optimized message routes, accounting for a range of real-world constraints. So when an O-RAN link fails (whether that link is direct from sender to receiver—or indirect), the system already has a reroute mapped out.

This is partly why we included “multi-hop routing” in the O-RAN V2X simulations.

Multi-hop V2X O-RAN routing complicated three separate elements of the simulation: for each signal’s middleman (some cars may be ideally positioned to relay a signal from car A to car B, but we made the simulation neglect any cars that were also overwhelmed with their own signals and signal-processing needs); for each signal’s strength (we required that every intermediate link be able to maintain a stable network connection, factoring in distance and traffic conditions); and for each signal’s latency (we required a realistic accounting for added signal latency time for each additional hop in a multi-hop routing).

And with each added complication, O-RAN V2X multi-hop routing continued to extend the network’s capacity from 25 percent of nearby cars connected (without multi-hop) to nearly 100 percent (with multi-hop).

These complications, at least at the simulation level, did not slow down the V2X network.

How Could O-RAN Ever Be Scaled Up for the Real World?

We are in touch with potential collaborators and institutions to develop testbeds, prototype hardware, and tester vehicles for potential proving grounds. The Institute of Science Tokyo, for instance, has already expressed interest in working on some of these early-stage problems.

To date, our published research on O-RAN V2X has centered around a computer simulation only. Real-world hardware will undoubtedly surface challenges our simulation could not. So, questions of network latency and the computational overhead needed for O-RAN V2X signaling remain as yet unresolved.

Plus, concerns about full interoperability and realistic security will each demand their own investigations. After all, no one will trust a V2X network to do anything if that network’s cyber vulnerabilities haven’t been anticipated and patched in advance.

Realizing the O-RAN V2X vision will require progress on multiple fronts simultaneously. On the standards side, O-RAN’s vehicular extensions—the interfaces that allow vehicles to participate in the network as managed elements rather than passive users—would ultimately need to be formally adopted by the O-RAN Alliance and recognized by 3GPP’s V2X specifications. That process takes years.

On the industry side, there is a more immediate problem that our architecture is already positioned to solve: interoperability.

Today, a car made by one manufacturer cannot necessarily parse V2X sensor data sent from a car made by another. Firmware is proprietary; data formats differ. But an O-RAN control layer would act as a universal translator—normalizing each vehicle’s data into a common format and accelerating a push toward true multi-platform vehicle-to-vehicle communications. A more widespread and truly universal standard would, by itself, represent a substantial step forward for V2X.

Discovery Loop wants to advance the pace of scientific discovery using AI to address issues across domains.

Chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving Google after a 27-year-long stint to start a new company called Discovery Loop that wants to accelerate research using AI.

Alphabet and Radical Ventures are backing the business as founding investors alongside funding from Khosla Ventures.

The founding team at Discovery Loop also includes Dean’s other departing Google colleagues – senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, research vice-president at DeepMind Oriol Vinyals and research scientist Quoc Le.

Together, they have helped develop multiple generations of core Google products – including Search, Ads, Translate, Tensor Processing Units, DeepMind’s life sciences model AlphaFold and Gemini AI, among several more technologies – and claim to number among some of the most-cited AI researchers.

The four want to begin by focusing on automating the process of machine learning (ML) research and engineering. “Historically, scientific progress has relied on these sequential human iterations. In many domains, this process remains incredibly slow and labour-intensive,” Discovery Loop’s website reads.

“By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster.

“Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people’s lives on a global scale.”

The start-up plans to experiment with the technology on its own systems before expanding into other scientific domains, with the hopes of developing AI systems capable of drug development or addressing environmental crises.

“Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

“We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.” Alphabet stocks dipped more than 4pc at market close yesterday (5 August).

The departures mark a continuation of a years-long shakeup in the tech industry, with top minds moving between rivals such as Meta, Amazon, Apple and Arm, or launching their own R&D-focused AI ventures.

For Google, the latest exits comes after parent company Alphabet recently posted a better-than-expected quarterly revenue of $119.8bn driven by an 82pc growth in its cloud business.

The company’s big-budget expenses seem to be working, according to Pichai, who told investors on last month’s earnings call that almost 90pc of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise. The Gemini app now has more than 950m monthly users, according to Google.

The company announced a further $15bn in capital expenditures for the year on the heels of its successful quarter. CNBC reported that Google is investing more than almost any company in the world in data centres, chips and related infrastructure.

Alphabet had initially announced a 2026 capex of up to $185bn, doubling expenses since last year to meet customer demand. This number was revised to $190bn in April, before estimations were further raised to now hit $205bn.

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When you can’t bring prices down, turn back the clock.

The Claude creator will also put together a new team in charge of designing the custom-made chips.

As first reported by the Business Insider, artificial intelligence company Anthropic has confirmed plans to design its own chips in response to a worldwide shortage and increased pressure to develop faster, more advanced AI systems.   

In April, it was reported by Reuters that the organisation was strongly considering building its own chips, as a means of having improved access to a steady supply and keeping pace with competitors Meta and OpenAI, both of which have similar projects underway.

The latter previously announced the development of the Broadcom-built Jalapeño chip, designed for inference workloads, while Meta has been developing its own ‘MTIA’ accelerators for AI workloads.

The timeline as to when Anthropic’s chip production might begin is unclear; however, the company is looking to add to its workforce in order to meet future AI development expectations. As per a recent job listing, Anthropic is seeking professionals eager to join a custom silicon team. 

It is currently unknown if the organisation will manufacture the chips by itself, but it has been previously reported that Anthropic may be looking at Samsung as a potential partner in the development of the chips. 

While building custom silicon is the next step in Anthropic’s ongoing AI and chip strategy, the company reportedly still intends to utilise a diversified hardware stack that includes technology from Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia and ​AMD. 

In late July, Anthropic announced plans to partner with AMD for 2GW of its latest-generation chips, in a bid to boost AI capacity and meet growing demands. The deal between the companies was reported to be worth “tens of billions of dollars”.

Anthropic is striving for dominance in the AI space ahead of a widely reported planned IPO, which is expected to value the company at more than $1trn. 

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