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The Lever’s daily email newsletter.🎧 New on Lever Time: After hiring MAGA lawyers, a tech giant got its antitrust case settled, and monopoly cops were fired. Can a Nixon-era law save the day?
👇 Spend three minutes reading this 950-word newsletter to learn about:
- How Elon Musk is making our internet worse.
- Big Sugar’s new lease on life.
- How ChatGPT is infiltrating our justice system.
- A Justice Department coup over a tech merger.
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TODAY'S NUGGETS
😶🌫️ Climate opacity for all. Last week, the Trump administration announced it would not enforce a first-of-its-kind federal climate disclosure requirement on public companies, abandoning common-sense transparency rules intended to keep the public informed of firms’ polluting efforts and climate-related financial risks. Instead, Big Business’s dirty deeds will stay in the dark.
🛰️ Internet buffering, brought to you by Elon. In a June handout to Elon Musk’s internet satellite company Starlink, President Donald Trump demanded that a $42 billion effort to bring high-speed internet to rural and underserved communities scrap plans to prioritize fiber-optic tech, even though it’s considered the fastest and most durable option. Now, states are preparing to redirect millions to Starlink and Amazon’s satellite program — even though research suggests low-Earth-orbit tech isn’t capable of meeting rural broadband demands.
- As tech reporter Karl Bode put it, “The result is going to be slower, shittier broadband, but a lot of these folks are too afraid of losing state money to be clear about it.”
