The FCC closed its extraordinary regulatory month by fining the nation's largest wireless carriers nearly $200 million for selling customers' real-time location data to third parties without consent — the biggest privacy enforcement in the agency's history. On Capitol Hill, UnitedHealth's CEO admitted under oath that the company paid a $22 million ransom over the Change Healthcare attack, and that intruders got in through a single server lacking multi-factor authentication. Apple then closed the week with the largest share buyback in corporate history — $110 billion — as iPhone sales fell 10% and the company teed up its AI reveal.
The most consequential policy week of the telecom year: President Biden signed the TikTok divest-or-ban law on Wednesday, and the FCC voted on Thursday to restore net neutrality — reclassifying broadband as a Title II service and reopening the decade's defining regulatory fight. Verizon opened carrier earnings season the same Monday, losing fewer wireless subscribers than feared as broadband — fixed wireless above all — carried the quarter. In one five-day stretch, Washington redrew the rules for the internet's most popular app and the pipes it travels on.
The CHIPS Act completed its leading-edge trifecta: Samsung landed $6.4 billion for its Texas expansion, meaning all three companies capable of frontier chipmaking — Intel, TSMC, and Samsung — are now building it on American soil. Netflix closed the book on the streaming wars' growth phase, posting a blowout subscriber quarter and then announcing it will stop reporting subscriber counts altogether. And on a Saturday vote, the House attached the TikTok divest-or-ban bill to a must-pass foreign-aid package — transforming a standalone gamble into near-certain law within days.
The CHIPS Act moved from legislation to checks: Washington offered TSMC up to $6.6 billion to expand its Arizona fabs, including a third plant and a commitment to bring 2-nanometer production to U.S. soil. Google, meanwhile, joined the custom-silicon club at Cloud Next, unveiling Axion — its first Arm-based server CPU — as every hyperscaler races to own its own compute stack. And Apple sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries warning of 'mercenary spyware' attacks, a reminder that the most sophisticated threats to mobile devices are bought, not built.
AT&T opened April cleaning up after a dataset covering 73 million current and former customers surfaced on a cybercrime forum — forcing millions of account passcodes to be reset and kicking off a breach saga that would shadow the carrier all year. Intel gave Wall Street its first honest look at the cost of rebuilding American chipmaking, disclosing a $7 billion operating loss in its foundry business. And Taiwan's strongest earthquake in 25 years rattled the island that fabricates most of the world's advanced chips — TSMC evacuated fabs, then restarted with minimal damage, a near-miss reminder of how concentrated the silicon supply chain remains.