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.
The AI assistant wars went head-to-head: OpenAI launched GPT-4o — a faster, free, voice-native model — one day before Google I/O answered with Gemini woven through search, Android, and everything else. Between them, the two events sketched the future of the phone as a conversational device. The week's quietest story may age the best: AT&T signed a definitive commercial agreement with AST SpaceMobile, moving space-based cellular from science project toward product. And the FCC used a new enforcement tool for the first time, branding the 'Royal Tiger' robocall operation as a formally designated threat group.