Weekly output: social-media cleanup, Verizon’s phone-unlock waiting period, NASA’s Starliner report

This will be a travel-abbreviated workweek: Friday afternoon, I head to Dulles to start my journey to Spain for MWC Barcelona, still one of my favorite reasons to get on a plane for business. I’ll be there until March 5, so the next few days would be an excellent time to hit me up with any questions you have about the future of the wireless industry.

Meanwhile, Patreon readers got a bonus post from me this week about my continued struggles with my home WiFi, in which trying to pick out a good mesh-network option has required wrestling with unexpected national-security concerns.

2/17/2026: Social-media cleanses, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me in studio to offer some perspective about people implicated in the Epstein files trying to cleanse their social-media history. I said that if you’re sufficiently prominent, the Internet doesn’t forget things.

2/18/2026: Paid Off Your Phone Early? Verizon to Ease 35-Day Hold to Unlock It, PCMag

Four days after Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reported that Verizon had begun requiring a 35-day waiting period to complete unlocking a phone paid off early (unless you made that payment in one of Verizon’s own stores with cash or a credit card’s chip or tap-to-pay options), I asked Verizon for comment. Hours later, I got a statement that the company was working to allow online payments to qualify for an immediate unlock–and then Verizon didn’t give Brodkin the same statement.

2/20/2026: Unpacking Starliner Failures, NASA Chief Delivers Scathing Assessment, PCMag

While I was at a space-industry conference in Tysons Thursday, NASA announced the findings of an investigation into everything that went wrong with Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule after its first and still only launch with astronauts aboard. So instead of writing up one of the panels at this event, I started reading the agency’s 311-page report, hit up Boeing PR for a comment and got in a call with a longtime observer and critic of NASA. Then I spent more of Friday than I’d planned on writing this post.

Thanks To Trump, Verizon Immediately Starts Making It Harder To Switch Mobile Carriers

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/22/thanks-to-trump-verizon-immediately-starts-making-it-harder-to-switch-mobile-carriers/

Weekly output: FCC frees Verizon from phone-unlocking rule, Donut Lab’s solid-state battery, Wikipedia turns 25, Google traffic trends

This week brought a lot of unpleasant headlines, but none made me feel uneasy like the news that Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson was subjected to an unexpected visit by the FBI at her house Wednesday that concluded with investigators confiscating her work and personal laptops, her phone and her smartwatch–all seized, it now seems, on a fraudulent pretext. Since then, the man who spent his equivalent of pocket change to buy the Post in 2013 has said nothing about that in public, yet another way in which Jeff Bezos has shown himself an unworthy successor to Katharine Graham and her son Don Graham.

In addition to what you see below, I wrote a post for Patreon readers sharing bonus bits about what I learned at CES two weeks ago.

1/12/2026, FCC Unties Verizon From 60-Day Phone-Unlocking Rule, PCMag

Two days after the Federal Communications Commission granted Verizon’s wish, Verizon suffered an hours-long outage that people could work around relatively easily if their phones were unlocked to allow them to add a third-party eSIM.

1/15/2026: Wikipedia Is Now 25 Years Old [Citation Not Needed], PCMag

I had made a mental note to myself to write an essay about the free online encyclopedia hitting the quarter-century mark, but then the actual date snuck up on me. Fortunately, the lede and the headline basically wrote themselves.

1/17/2026: Donut Labs’ Solid-State Battery-Powered Motorcycle Turned Heads at CES, But Big Questions Remain, PCMag

Writing this left me feeling over my skis more than usual–I don’t cover battery technology in any great depth, this startup has disclosed almost nothing about the design of its solid-state batteries, and two outside analysts weren’t willing to assess their pitch. But reading up at length on this company and on others working on better EV batteries did make me realize one thing: There’s enough innovation happening here that we don’t need Donut’s invention to work.

1/17/2026: AI Is Still Hammering News Sites, Google Search and Social Referrals Plunge, PCMag

The brutal declines in Google search traffic reported in a study published Monday by the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism caught my eyes and those of my editors, but I also found some news value in this report’s stats about which online platforms and technologies newsroom leaders plan to emphasize or back away from.

#AI #AIOverview #BrendanCarr #ces #DonutLab #EVBattery #FCC #phoneUnlocking #SIMLock #smartphoneUnlock #solidStateBattery #verizon #Wikipedia

Trump FCC Helps Verizon Make It Harder For You To Switch Wireless Carriers

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/16/trump-fcc-helps-verizon-make-it-harder-for-you-to-switch-wireless-carriers/