net-neutrality
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Dane Jasper and the business of leaving people alone
A misused college account helped give Sonic its start. Three decades later, Dane Jasper’s career traces a stubborn idea: an internet provider can build the connection without claiming the customer’s life on the other end.
Sail Internet
Sail Internet is a Santa Clara-based internet service provider that uses a hybrid of fiber and fixed-wireless technology to deliver high-speed, no-contract broadband to homes and businesses across the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Founded in 2015 by Stanford-trained broadband engineers, the company positions itself as a customer-first, net-neutral alternative to incumbent cable and telecom giants, reaching residences, multi-dwelling communities, and enterprises with gigabit-class connectivity that skips costly trench-and-dig infrastructure.
Sonic
Sonic is the largest independently owned internet service provider in California, founded in 1994 in Santa Rosa. It builds and runs its own fiber-optic network, selling fast, flat-priced gigabit and 10-gigabit home and business internet with no contracts, no data caps, and a privacy stance that has earned it a perfect score from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After more than 30 years serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonic began its first out-of-region expansion in 2026, lighting up fiber in Los Angeles and Dallas.
Timothy B. Lee
Timothy B. Lee is an independent AI journalist and newsletter writer who runs Understanding AI, a Substack newsletter with over 263,000 subscribers that explains how artificial intelligence actually works - minus the hype and minus the doom. Drawing on a rare combination of a computer science master's from Princeton, two decades of tech policy reporting at outlets like Ars Technica, the Washington Post, and Vox, and an instinct for clear, jargon-free prose, Lee has become one of the most-read independent voices in AI journalism. His superpower is translating complex machine learning concepts into accessible explainers that neither oversell nor undersell the technology.