If you follow the politics of AI and kids online safety, the last six weeks have been a firehose. The House passed a bipartisan kids online safety bill for the first time. The White House is negotiating with Sen. Marsha Blackburn on a package pairing kids safety bills with some form of AI preemption—though the scope remains unclear. Sen. Ted Cruz has signaled a Senate Commerce markup that could touch everything from social media design to catastrophic AI risk. And amid it all, the Trump administration intervened in the rollout of Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models.

But this is Congress, and motion is not necessarily progress. Conventional wisdom says nothing significant passes after August recess in an election year unless it hitches a ride on a must-pass vehicle, and Democrats eyeing the midterms may figure their negotiating position improves in January. Still, the House did pass a package, the White House is actively negotiating, and Cruz is looking for a path. We shouldn't confuse motion for progress, but we shouldn't discount the motion either. The stakes are real—for AI developers, platforms, state governments, safety advocates, and the kids and families these proposals are supposed to protect.

Evan is joined by Ben Brody, technology reporter at Punchbowl News, where he covers congressional efforts to rein in technology companies, from social media platforms to frontier AI developers. His reporting is essential reading for anyone following these debates.

The cost of memory chips is skyrocketing, and even the biggest companies are feeling it. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the Wall Street Journal that raising prices on Apple products is now "unavoidable," likening the spike in chip costs to a hundred-year flood unlike anything he'd seen in forty years in the business. And it's not just Apple. If you're in the market for a new laptop, gaming console, or even a car, you may have noticed the sticker price creeping up. High prices have been a stubborn fact across the economy for a while, but what's happening with electronics is unique: it isn't really about broader macroeconomic trends, supply-chain snarls, or the price of gas. It comes down to AI.

The data centers behind the AI boom run on memory chips—the same basic kind that sits inside your phone, your laptop, your car, and your home internet equipment. Only a handful of companies make them, and the AI giants are buying up everything they can at almost any price. When a few buyers with bottomless budgets corner the market for a part everyone else needs, the price goes up for everyone—including the companies that build and operate America's broadband networks, whose routers and gateways run on those same chips. Recently, a broad coalition of industry groups wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warning of an "urgent imbalance in the market for memory chips that could lead to significant and sustained near-term price increases for American households."

Evan is joined by former U.S. Senator Cory Gardner, now President and CEO of NCTA—The Internet & Television Association. His organization represents Internet service providers building broadband across the country, much of it fiber in rural America, as part of government programs to close the digital divide. They dig into Gardner's proposed policy solutions to the memory-chip crunch, the other ways AI is reshaping his industry, wireless spectrum policy, the security of our networks, and more.

References:

• Cross-Sector Industry Coalition letter to Treasury Secretary Bessent and Commerce Secretary Lutnick on the memory-chip shortage, (June 3, 2026) — https://www.ncta.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Industry-Coalition-Letter-re-Memory-Shortage.pdf
• "America's AI Infrastructure Is Threatened by Memory-Chip Shortages," National Review — https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/05/can-america-fix-its-chip-crisis/
• "Here's How the U.S. Can Win the Age of Artificial Intelligence," National Review — https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/03/heres-how-the-u-s-can-win-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/
• "As Other Costs Rise, Internet Is Doing More for the Same Price," The Washington Times — https://www.ncta.com/news/cory-gardner-washington-times-internet-delivers-more-value-without-rising-costs
• "Wi-Fi and Employment in the United States," Dr. Raul Katz / Telecom Advisory Services for WifiForward (March 2025) — https://wififorward.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Wi-Fi-and-employment_3.25.25-v259.pdf

Recently, at its big annual developer conference, Google announced the most significant overhaul of search in its history. It's rebuilding the search box around AI: conversational queries, an "AI Mode" that answers follow-up questions, and agents that gather information for you in the background.That announcement set off a wave of commentary about the death of the "ten blue links" — the idea that search is no longer a ranked list of websites you click through to, but a conversation with a chatbot and answers delivered directly. For many, it’s a fundamental reshaping of how the internet works.

So what does it mean for the people who actually make the stuff on the web—publishers, creators, anyone who depends on being found? They've already been bemoaning steep drops in traffic from AI-powered search that answers a user's question without ever sending them to the source. And with that lost traffic goes the advertising and the subscriptions that pay for the work in the first place. 

Predictably, many are waxing nostalgic about the good old days of the open web. But were those days actually so good? People have been griping about this bargain for years: that Google scraped their content without paying, that it kept users on its own page, that it became an ad-tech monopoly sitting in the middle of every transaction. And at the same time, the AI companies argue they could never have built these tools, now used by hundreds of millions of people, without access to the open web. For better or worse, ChatGPT probably doesn't exist if the web had been a closed, permissioned, pay-to-read place from the start. 

So what should the norms be going forward? When AI crawlers put enormous strain on a site like Wikipedia, who should pay for that? If the old handshake between the people who make content and the companies that index it is eroding, what should the new one look like, and how do we even get there? Do we write new rules, or does this whole thing just stay tied up in court for the next decade?

Evan is joined by Derek Slater, a founding partner of Proteus Strategies. He spent fifteen years at Google where he built and ran the firm’s information-policy team. Before that, he worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard's Berkman Center. He's an expert on all these issues, and has long advocated for the freedom to access and learn from information on the web.

Read some of Derek’s work here:

• “AI Training, the Licensing Mirage, and Effective Alternatives to Support Creative Workers,” in Tech Policy Press
• “Worried About AI Monopoly? Embrace Copyright’s Limits,” in Lawfare

In the weeks before his suicide, ChatGPT allegedly told Adam Raine that he "didn't owe" anyone his survival. When shown an image of the noose he planned to use, the chatbot offered him advice on how to make it more effective. And OpenAI’s flagship product even helped Adam hide his plans from his parents.

Raine's case is unfortunately one of a growing number involving AI chatbots that have coerced or cajoled vulnerable users—some of them children—toward self-harm. When the families sued, they ran into a familiar argument and potential roadblock. The First Amendment to the US Constitution has long stymied efforts to regulate technology, even to protect children. State laws that aim to curb addictive design features, require that tech platforms verify the ages of their users, or hold firms liable for harms have all faced First Amendment challenges, with tech companies often prevailing.

In the case of Raine, Sewell, and others, AI companies are arguing that the outputs of their chatbots—the responses to their users—are protected speech under the First Amendment. As one AI company's lawyers put it: “The First Amendment protects speech, not just human speakers.”

The argument raises uncomfortable questions. What rights, if any, should AI have, especially when the machines seek to mimic humanity? Do we humans have a first amendment right to receive speech from bots, even when the responses may be harmful? And what are the potential implications for this litigation on society’s ability to regulate AI going forward?

Evan discusses these questions with John Ehrett, an attorney in Washington D.C. and former chief counsel for US Senator Josh Hawley, and Brad Littlejohn, director of programs at American Compass, a "New Right" conservative economic think tank. Ehrett and Littlejohn co-authored a piece in National Affairs called “The Post-Human First Amendment,” discussing the history of free speech rights in the US and arguing that the rise of AI may require a serious course correction.

Additional references:

The Myth of Citizens United

The First Amendment as Suicide Pact

President Trump just returned from Beijing, where he and Xi Jinping spent two days hashing out a new phase in U.S.–China great power competition. A lot is up for negotiation, from AI chip sales to soybeans. But while the headlines focus on what each side is willing to give on, the Federal Communications Commission has been taking an aggressive line on national security—on drones, Wi-Fi routers, the foreign labs that test our electronics, and more. If you read the news a lot, you might think the FCC is mostly focused on disputes over broadcast television. But the agency is at the center of some of the most consequential issues in economic and national security policy right now. And it has been very busy.

In the last 18 months, the FCC has cracked down on foreign-made drones and foreign-made Wi-Fi routers, moved to bar Chinese state-owned carriers from interconnecting with U.S. networks, worked with e-commerce sites to scrub millions of prohibited Chinese device listings off Amazon and eBay, kicked Chinese-controlled testing labs out of the American certification system, and greenlit more than $40 billion in wireless spectrum transactions that could reshape the mobile and satellite markets for the next decade.

Step back, and a bigger question comes into focus: what kind of FCC has this become? For decades, the Republican vision of the FCC was mostly a deregulatory one—fewer rules, lighter touch, more reliance on markets. While Carr has done plenty of deregulation, he's also been willing to flex the agency's muscle to achieve specific priorities, from reshoring jobs and manufacturing to securing protections for wireless tower workers in merger contexts. Some of those actions run contrary to traditional libertarian and conservative notions of the role of government. Proponents call it a long-overdue correction to the Republican party's free market absolutism. Critics call it coercion and interference in the market. Either way, it is a real shift and one of the things we discuss on today's show.

Evan is joined by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to talk about drones, Wi-Fi routers, and the broader national security agenda; the recent EchoStar / AT&T / SpaceX spectrum transactions and what they mean for the emerging direct-to-device satellite market; the wireless tower workforce commitments that have become a signature of his merger reviews; and the issues he sees on the agency's horizon.

Evan worked for Brendan Carr when he was a Commissioner at the FCC during the first Trump administration.

In this short intro episode, host Evan Swarztrauber lays out what this podcast is and what it isn't. The show is about the technology and telecommunications policy fights that will define the next decade — from AI and antitrust to wireless spectrum, broadband, drones, satellites, and the national security questions that increasingly cut across all of it.

The center is where tech policy actually gets made, when bipartisan coalitions  can agree on something specific enough to move. The edge is where the rhetoric often lives: the hyperbolic arguments and edge cases that dominate the  conversation in Washington. Repealing net neutrality was going to kill the Internet. Touching Section 230 will end free speech. If Washington does, or does not, do exactly what I want, then China wins and America loses. The Center Edge takes the edge cases seriously without letting them eat the whole conversation.

Guests will include the regulators who hold real levers of power at the FCC, FTC, Commerce, and elsewhere; members of Congress and the staffers who actually write the bills; founders, investors, and operators inside the technology industry; and the scholars and advocates shaping the public debate. Some episodes will go deep on a specific issue. Others will pull back and ask bigger questions about where this all is going. The goal is for listeners to come away with a better understanding of the debate, a better sense of why it matters, and a better calibrated read on the next round of headlines coming out of Washington.

About the host. Evan Swarztrauber is Principal at CorePoint Strategies, a tech and telecom policy consulting firm he founded in 2025, and a Senior Fellow at the Digital Progress Institute. He previously hosted The Dynamist for the Foundation for American Innovation, and served as a policy advisor at the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai and then-Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Coming up first. Episode 1 is a sit-down with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — covering the agency's national security push on Chinese-made drones and Wi-Fi routers, the recent EchoStar / AT&T / SpaceX spectrum transactions, the emerging direct-to-device satellite market, and the evolving role of the FCC under his tenure.

Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Leaving a quick review helps new listeners find the show — it takes thirty seconds and it actually matters.

Get in touch. Reach out to Evan with feedback, ideas, or suggestions for future guests.

The Center Edge is sponsored by the Digital Progress Institute, a bipartisan tech policy think tank in Washington. The show is produced by Vulgate Media. Special thanks to Joel Thayer and Nick Degani at DPI for making this show possible.