A holiday-shortened week in the U.S. still managed to move the regulatory ground under the industry's feet. The Supreme Court closed its term with Corner Post, extending the window to challenge federal agency rules just days after overturning Chevron deference — a one-two punch that puts decades of FCC rulemaking within reach of fresh litigation. In Brussels, regulators charged Meta over its pay-or-consent ad model, the second-ever Digital Markets Act case. And in the world's second-largest mobile market, India's brutal price war officially ended as Jio and Airtel's first tariff hikes since 2021 took effect.
The Supreme Court ended its term by detonating four decades of administrative law: Loper Bright overturned Chevron deference, stripping federal agencies — very much including the FCC — of the benefit of the doubt when statutes are ambiguous. It is the single most consequential development for telecom regulation in a generation, landing three weeks before the FCC's net neutrality rules were due to take effect. The same week, Brussels filed its first-ever Digital Markets Act charges against Apple over App Store steering, and the Court separately let the government keep talking to social platforms about misinformation, tossing Murthy v. Missouri on standing.
Nvidia completed its climb, passing Microsoft to become the most valuable public company on earth — a title held by a chipmaker for the first time in the modern market era. The week's cautionary tale came from the auto industry: a ransomware attack on CDK Global, the software backbone for roughly 15,000 dealerships, froze car sales across the country and dragged on for days, another demonstration that a single vendor can be a national single point of failure. And Apple, eleven days after unveiling Apple Intelligence, said its marquee AI features won't launch in the EU this year — blaming the Digital Markets Act's interoperability requirements.
Brussels completed the transatlantic pincer: eighteen days after the DMA took effect, the European Commission opened non-compliance investigations into Apple, Alphabet, and Meta — testing steering rules, self-preferencing, and the legality of 'pay or consent.' Amazon answered the AI alliance question with its wallet, completing a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, its largest venture bet ever. And the week closed with a Saturday bombshell: AT&T confirmed that a dataset covering 73 million current and former customers — Social Security numbers included — was circulating on the dark web, opening the year's defining carrier-security saga.