Allowing Iran to continue to control the crucial waterway is likely to be highly unpalatable to Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

It also raises questions for Opec+, the oil producers’ group, with analysts warning that handing Iran control of Hormuz could fundamentally alter the balance of power within the organization by giving Tehran a potential veto over rival members’ exports.

Ali Shihabi, a commentator close to the Saudi royal court, said the kingdom would demand “unimpeded” access to global markets.

“Allowing Iran any form of control over the strait would be a red line,” Shihabi said. “The priority has to be unimpeded access through the strait.”

On Wednesday Saudi Arabia’s key East-West pipeline, which the kingdom has been using to reroute oil exports to the Red Sea, was struck by a drone, according to people familiar with the matter, despite the ceasefire.

Around 175 million barrels of crude and refined products are currently loaded onto 187 tankers in the Gulf, according to Kpler data—which could now start to move, depending on what happens in the strait.

Industry executives estimate that 300 to 400 ships are waiting to exit the Gulf as soon as it is possible to pass safely, with one describing it as a “car park.”

Several traders said they thought the situation in the coming days would resemble the system that has developed over the past fortnight, in which a handful of ships that have been approved by Iran are allowed to pass on a specific route.

During the conflict this was largely limited to vessels that had generally done business with Iran and that were not connected to the US, Israel, or Gulf states that had provided staging for attacks.

Martin Kelly, head of advisory at maritime intelligence group EOS Risk, said that there was “no way” that the backlog of ships waiting to get out could be cleared in two weeks.

Around 10 to 15 ships might be able to transit the strait per day, as the process was “quite time-consuming,” he said, down from 135 ships before the war.

Additional reporting by Andrew England.

© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/iran-demands-cryptocurrency-toll-from-tankers-passing-through-strait-of-hormuz/

I don’t—thankfully—have to follow every statement that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, makes about the world. Many of these statements seem more like “hustles” or “pitches” than attempts to speak thoughtfully about the future. Even if they are genuine statements of belief, they often read like a teenager’s first sci-fi novel, written under the influence of weed and way too much Star Trek.

Consider, for instance, Altman’s blog post “A Gentle Singularity,” published last year and read by nearly 600,000 people. Its central thesis seems to be that AI is all upside; everything has been great so far, and everything will be even greater in the future! I mean, just wait until we build robots that we can shove these AIs into—then tell those robots to go make more robots.

If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.

Everything is getting better; indeed, it’s getting better faster thanks to “self-reinforcing loops” like this. Downsides? Trick question! There aren’t any real downsides because people get used to things. Quickly. Just listen to how great it’s gonna be:

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.

If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example). Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.

Perhaps you have looked around at the world recently and wondered whether building “ever-more-wonderful things for each other” is actually a good description of what you are seeing.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-our-ai-overlords/

The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that could have forced Internet service provider Grande Communications to terminate broadband subscribers accused of piracy.

Yesterday’s ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to fight piracy. In the case involving Cox and Sony, the court said that “a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

Cox is one of several cases in which record labels sought financial damages from ISPs that continued to serve customers whose IP addresses were repeatedly traced to torrent downloads or uploads. In October 2024, record labels Universal, Warner, and Sony got a win over Grande when the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decided the ISP was liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The conservative-leaning 5th Circuit court held in a 3-0 decision that “Grande knew (or was willfully blind to) the identities of its infringing subscribers” but “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway, rather than taking simple measures to prevent infringement.” But the 5th Circuit now has to reconsider the Grande v. UMG case after a two-sentence ruling issued yesterday by the Supreme Court.

Grande’s petition “for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for further consideration in light of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment,” the Supreme Court said.

Grande might have had to pay millions to the record labels if the Supreme Court had ruled differently. Grande once faced a $46.8 million damages verdict, but the 5th Circuit ruled that the amount was too high and ordered a new damages trial even though it otherwise sided with the record labels. Cox was once on the hook for a $1 billion jury verdict, but that specific damages amount was also overturned before the case reached the Supreme Court.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/scotus-overturns-5th-circuit-ruling-that-told-isp-to-kick-pirates-off-internet/

Apple invested $1.5 billion in Globalstar in 2024, taking a 20 percent stake in the company. As part of the agreement, Globalstar agreed to reserve 85 percent of its network capacity for the iPhone maker for satellite-based texting when outside cellular tower coverage.

Bloomberg reported in October that Globalstar was exploring a sale and had held early talks with SpaceX.

Amazon has been pushing forward with its own effort, dubbed Leo, launching the first batch of satellites for its Internet constellation last year.

The company has more than 180 satellites in orbit, but its deployment is dwarfed by the more than 10,000 active satellites operated by SpaceX.

Amazon in February was forced to seek a two-year extension to a July deadline from the Federal Communications Commission for the launch of 1,600 satellites.

Amazon plans to have about 700 satellites in space by the middle of this year but has said that a launch capacity shortage is hampering the build-out of its service, according to regulatory filings.

Amazon has signed deals with JetBlue and Delta for Internet services on flights commencing in 2027 and 2028, respectively.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, told investors in February that Leo was part of a suite of “incremental opportunities” that the $2.2 trillion e-commerce group would pursue.

Globalstar reported full-year revenue of $273 million in its latest annual results, a 9 percent increase from 2024. Income from operations was $7.4 million in 2025, after a narrow loss in the year before.

Additional reporting from Rafe Rosner-Uddin and Stephen Morris.

© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/amazon-is-trying-to-buy-globalstar-to-compete-with-spacexs-starlink/

On March 27, the White House announced a “powerful new official mobile app,” calling it “the fastest, most powerful way to stay informed and engaged with the Trump Administration.”

While armchair developers and infosec experts have questioned some of the app’s technical design choices, a former FBI intelligence analyst uncovered an unusual fact: The small business owner behind the White House app has a side hobby as a conspiracy theorist.

The White House app was created by 45Press, a company based in Canfield, Ohio, a town of fewer than 8,000 people located roughly halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. (Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States.) The company’s website describes it as a “design, development, and DevOps agency” and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner; it lists Amazon, NBC, and Sony as past clients.

According to his own X account, the CEO of 45Press, Joel Kendall, has a “hobby” running a social media presence and store under the name “Sir Storia,” which he calls “a website directory of historical and paranormal locations. If it was historical, paranormal or unexplained, we want it added!”

In August 2025, Kendall created a (now-defunct) online store offering T-shirts for sale of what he called “the most famous UFO events that ever happened in Ohio.” In a Facebook post, Kendall said he hoped his shop would be “the @walmart for UFOs, UAPs, Aliens, Paranormal and much more!”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/official-white-house-app-developer-also-a-ufo-conspiracy-theorist/

“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” it said.

Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.

In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.

We asked SpaceX today whether it has determined the cause of the December anomaly or the one on Sunday, and will update this article if we get a response.

Starlink reported near-crash after Chinese launch

Starlink also had a near-crash in December, in a different incident about a week before the “tumbling” satellite. Starlink Senior VP Michael Nicolls wrote on December 12 that a Chinese company had launched nine satellites without coordinating with other space users. Lack of coordination increases the risk of collisions, he said.

“As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude,” Nicolls wrote at the time, referring to the Chinese launch. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators—this needs to change.”

Coordination can only become more important if SpaceX goes through with its stated plan of launching a million satellites to create an orbital data center.

Under normal circumstances, Starlink satellites reaching their end-of-life date follow “a targeted reentry approach to deorbit satellites over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes,” Starlink says in a document on “satellite demisability.” But satellites that fall to Earth unexpectedly should pose no risk to people on the ground because they are designed to “demise with extremely low impact energy,” according to Starlink.

“A critical aspect of sustainable satellite design is demisability, which ensures that satellites fully break up and burn up during atmospheric reentry,” Starlink says in the document. “Any fragments that do not completely demise should have negligible impact energy.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/starlink-satellite-breaks-apart-into-tens-of-objects-spacex-confirms-anomaly/

Customers are hoping that consumer protection laws will require Costco to refund money they paid due to tariffs. The proposed class includes “all persons in the United States who purchased goods from Costco during the period February 1, 2025, through February 24, 2026, that were subject to tariffs” that Donald Trump unlawfully imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers (IEEPA) Act, the group said.

If customers win, Costco could owe much more than just that. Branding Costco’s plan to keep the refunds as “unscrupulous, outrageous, offensive to the public conscience, and/or marked by injustice, partiality, or deception,” they’ve asked for punitive damages if its actions are deemed unlawful.

Survey: 34% of firms passed on 50% of tariff costs

Costco customers’ claims are intended to finally settle “an actual controversy as to the rightful ownership of the tariff surcharges paid” to Costco.

For other businesses that increased prices, the class action could potentially establish a precedent on who rightfully owns the tariff surcharges customers paid. That could force even more customer lawsuits over refunds nationwide, possibly at a time when businesses’ resources are expected to be heavily tied up in navigating the messy process to secure refunds.

Yesterday, KPMG, a global organization that helps businesses with tax services, released results from a survey analyzing how 300 US businesses similar to Costco passed on tariff costs to consumers over the year that the IEEPA tariffs were in effect.

Beyond confirming that many customers have already paid higher prices across various industries, KPMG reported that the outlook for customers sick of paying tariffs remains discouraging in the near future.

“The share of businesses passing on more than half of tariff costs has risen to 34 percent, more than doubling from 13 percent in May of last year. Further price increases appear imminent, with 55 percent of executives planning to raise prices by up to 15 percent within the next six months,” it said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/costco-sued-for-seeking-refunds-on-tariffs-customers-paid/

“Defendants also do not contest Plaintiff’s assertion that in the 16 [market areas] in which Nexstar or Tegna has a Big Four duopoly or triopoly, they appoint a single news director to oversee a single newsroom and use the same on-air talent for all Big Four channels they own in the [market area],” Nunley wrote.

The pre-merger Nexstar owned 201 full-power TV stations and Tegna owned 64, for a total of 265. They agreed to divest six stations, which would eventually reduce the total to 259.

DirecTV argues that “absent a hold-separate order, Nexstar will fully absorb Tegna and eliminate the companies’ head-to-head competition in the 31 overlap markets,” Nunley wrote. “Plaintiff asserts it will suffer irreparable harm from significantly diminished bargaining power vis-à-vis Nexstar in retransmission consent negotiations. Plaintiff contends it will soon find itself negotiating for access to highly sought after content, including Big Four sports and local news broadcasts, with a merged firm that intends to threaten blackouts doubling or even tripling their present danger.”

Judge: Nexstar can’t swallow up Tegna yet

Nunley decided that DirecTV’s Clayton Act claim is likely to succeed on the merits and that “the public interest favors a hold-separate order.” The hold-separate order has numerous components aimed at preventing Nexstar and Tegna from integrating assets or making decisions together.

“Nexstar must permit Tegna to continue operating as a separate and distinct, independently managed business unit from Nexstar, and Nexstar must put measures in place to maintain Tegna as an ongoing, economically viable, and active competitor,” Nunley wrote. “Tegna shall have separate management that operates Tegna in the ordinary course consistent with pre-closing practices.”

One provision in the order requires that Tegna leadership maintain control over decision-making “with respect to retransmission consent agreements and negotiations, newsroom personnel, operations and programming, product and service offerings, product development, advertisement sales, and personnel.”

Another provision says that all local TV stations owned by Tegna “will be maintained and operated as independent, ongoing, economically viable, and active competitors in the business of licensing retransmission consent” to TV providers. A provision aimed at preventing layoffs says the firms “shall use all reasonable efforts to maintain” Tegna stations’ pre-merger staff levels.

Nexstar has until April 1 to submit an argument as to why it should not face a preliminary injunction, and a hearing is scheduled for April 7 to discuss the potential preliminary injunction. The judge also ordered Nexstar to submit a report by April 6 detailing steps it has taken to comply with the temporary restraining order.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/judge-halts-nexstar-tegna-merger-after-fcc-let-firms-exceed-tv-ownership-limit/

Because Meta was going to face the contributory infringement claim anyway, it would not prejudice Meta to require discovery on the issue so late in the class action, Chhabria wrote.

Further, “denying the motion to add the contributory infringement claim could potentially harm the interests of the proposed class members,” Chhabria said. If the class action proceeded without the claim, members would be barred from ever raising it, even if the Entrepreneur Media case ruling went against Meta, the judge noted.

“There is a serious concern that the interests of the absent class members would be harmed, through no fault of their own,” Chhabria wrote, while noting that he granted the authors’ request “reluctantly.”

“On the flip side,” Chhabria said, adding the claim to the class action basically “meant that if the named plaintiffs obtained summary judgment and subsequently obtained class certification, proposed class members would know, when deciding whether to opt out of the class, that they had essentially already won.”

Chhabria’s ruling perhaps incentivizes Meta to dodge these claims as fast as possible. He noted that Meta faces no discovery in the class action “until plaintiffs can get past summary judgment on the distribution and contributory infringement claims.”

Moving forward, authors may feel somewhat more optimistic that they could get a partial win. Chhabria explained the standard for contributory infringement as a lower bar, proving that Meta was “facilitating copyright infringement by third parties by uploading protected works onto the torrenting network.”

Yet the authors can’t be sure, since looming on the horizon, Meta is drafting a filing based on the Supreme Court ruling that could change the game.

Already, Meta is seemingly willing to make any argument to escape consequences for torrenting. It’s continuing to argue that the number of works at dispute is a small fraction of the total data that was torrented. And it has even claimed that there’s no way to prove that Meta ever knew that torrenting required uploading.

However, if Meta loses at the summary judgment stage, the authors are ready to argue that none of Meta’s internal discussions of torrenting should be privileged. If that discovery request is eventually granted, it could finally expose who exactly at Meta approved the torrenting and how well did they understand how BitTorrent works.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/meta-hopes-scotus-piracy-ruling-will-help-it-beat-lawsuit-over-torrenting-ai-data/

Now, oil rigs in the region face stricter regulations to ensure their systems are up to date. They are also required to comply with Endangered Species Act requirements to minimize their impacts on vulnerable animals. The latest jeopardy finding for the Rice’s whale says boats should immediately begin using technology to avoid vessel strikes and monitor for the presence of the animal.

But Trump has rolled back many environmental protections he thinks stand in the way of oil. He scrapped drilling prohibitions in ecologically sensitive areas. His offshore fossil fuel expansion plan, the Center for Biological Diversity estimated, could trigger thousands of oil spills across the country, based on average spill rates in recent decades. And his administration rescinded guidance in February for oil and gas vessels to slow down in the western Gulf to avoid hitting whales.

The God Squad could remove other regulations on industry activities. Given that this national security exemption is unprecedented, only time will tell how it plays out, Farber said. But he expects further litigation.

The Trump administration has “a real advantage going in, because it’s [claiming] national security, but they’re really pressing that to kind of its far limits,” he said.

Plater said the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws that allows citizens to increase enforcement through substantive actions. He’s seen this firsthand: The snail darter case that threw the law into the public spotlight decades ago was spurred by an idea from one of his law students for a paper.

In his view, the committee that grew out of that case is for the most part “a very fair, careful bypass” for extreme scenarios.

Now, however, Plater fears it will be “weaponized to roll back citizen enforceable protections for all the endangered and threatened species in the Gulf.”

“This is not just talking about a whale and the need for fossil fuels. It is just one more act in a political quashing of citizen involvement in statutory enforcement and protection of public values,” he said. “Scratch away at almost any environmental controversy, and pretty soon you’re looking at big questions of democratic governance.”

Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems, and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.

She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/trump-convenes-god-squad-to-override-endangered-species-act-up-oil-production/