Telecom Intelligence: Week of August 5, 2024 A federal judge opened the week by ruling that Google is an illegal monopolist in search — a decision aimed at Mountain View that immediately raised questions about the billions Google pays Apple and carriers for default placement on phones. The quieter story may prove more important for network operators: Lumen disclosed $5 billion in new deals selling fiber capacity to AI data-center builders, the first hard evidence that the AI boom has become a direct revenue line for telecom infrastructure. And EchoStar's second-quarter results kept the industry's most precarious balance sheet in the spotlight, with Boost Mobile bleeding slower but the debt clock still ticking.