Christmas week delivered a signed law, a longer casualty list, and a stress test nobody framed as one. President Biden signed the 895 billion dollar defense bill on December 23, finally funding the 3 billion dollar rip-and-replace program and setting the spectrum studies that feed the next auction pipeline. Four days later the White House confirmed a ninth US telecom had fallen to Salt Typhoon, attributing the breadth of the compromise to plainly inadequate carrier security. And on Christmas Day, 65 million Americans watched NFL football over Netflix instead of broadcast towers, the largest live sports streaming audience on record and a quiet referendum on whether the nation's broadband was ready for appointment television.
The industry got its new referee and lost its biggest pending deal in the same week. Donald Trump named Brendan Carr, the FCC's senior Republican and author of its Project 2025 chapter, as chairman, ending two weeks of speculation and starting the countdown on the Biden-era agenda. By Friday, DirecTV had walked away from its acquisition of Dish after bondholders refused the haircut the deal required, Comcast confirmed it will spin off most of its cable networks into a separate company, and the White House summoned carrier executives to face the Salt Typhoon crisis directly.