What to Do With a Data Center Pause — and Unpacking the ‘Censorship-Industrial’ Complex Narrative

Good morning!

In the United States, various jurisdictions are pressing “pause” on the development of new data centers, and on July 14, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order establishing the first statewide moratorium on hyperscale facilities. Many of these moratoria are designed to enable more study on the effects of data centers to the environment, electrical grid and water supply, and of various other impacts to local and regional economies.

Tech Policy Press contributing editor Dean Jackson and Tim Bernard, a tech policy analyst and writer who has contributed frequently to the site, collect policy choices local governments can weigh while a data center moratorium is in effect, drawing on 17 publicly available resources from governments, researchers, and advocacy organizations. It organizes the options into categories spanning transparency, zoning, power and water use, taxation and community benefit agreements, labor protections, and enforcement.

Detailing the impact of the ‘censorship-industrial complex’ narrative

This month, in partnership with Type Investigations, MIT Technology Review published a feature titled “How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy.” It considers the emergence and impact of the narrative that revolves around the idea of the “censorship industrial complex,” and how a network of aligned right wing actors collaborate to build that narrative. It also details the impact on civil society groups and independent technology researchers who have been targeted with lawsuits, investigations, visa restrictions, and various forms of harassment for their work.

This week, I spoke to two of the authors of the piece about what they learned reporting it, and where the story might go next: Eileen Guo, MIT Technology Review senior reporter for features and investigations, and open source investigative reporter Gisela Perez de Acha. You can listen to the conversation here.

There’s a great deal more on the site this week, covering issues from Brazil to Vietnam and beyond.

State control and surveillance

• As of July 1, Vietnam's updated Cybersecurity Law took effect, Khadija Alam reports for Tech Policy Press. What counts as a violation now extends beyond memes and "fake news" to boycott calls, "causing division," and more.
• Petra Molnar, a fellow at Tech Policy Press, argues that migrant deaths at automated borders "are not malfunctions or byproducts, but rather the system actually working as designed." This perspective is drawn from her new open-access book.
• Jake Laperruque, a Tech Policy Press fellow and deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at Center for Democracy and Technology, says there's no real evidence automated license plate readers like Flock are driving crime down. The real danger is what mass video surveillance becomes next, he says.

Platform accountability

• California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey took Meta to trial in Oakland this week over alleged harms to children, part of the multi-district litigation that now comprises thousands of cases. Varsha Bansal, a fellow at Tech Policy Press, spoke to legal experts about the implications.
• Children's online safety has become a leading political issue. Lisa Dittmer, Paloma Candia and Ahmed Dhman of Amnesty International argue the voices of children themselves remain noticeably absent from the debate.
• The same race-neutral logic that led the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act also shapes social media trust and safety systems—with similar harms for people of color, writes Dhanaraj Thakur from the Fair Technology Initiative, part of the Multiracial Democracy Project at the George Washington University Law School. “As social media companies increasingly rely on AI-based technologies to analyze content, these models will almost certainly struggle to accurately assess context and intention, potentially leaving race-based hate speech online,” he writes.

AI governance

• Many read Xi Jinping's call to "encourage open source" AI at last month’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai as China going all-in on open weights. Graham Webster, a Stanford scholar and DigiChina editor-in-chief, argues the same speech stressed "security and controllability" — signaling an unresolved tension, not a settled bet.
• Who defines the problem? Who controls the system? Who benefits and bears the errors? Who can contest the decision? Massimo Ragneddaand Maria Laura Ruiu of the University of Sharjah, UAE, propose four questions every consequential AI audit should answer, adding a "power test" alongside the fairness test.
• Financial whistleblower law was written as crisis response, after the catastrophe. AI is different: the evidence is already here, write Raqda Sayidali, a research scholar at the ILINA Program, Abra Ganz, head of AI Policy at Pour Demain, and Karl Koch, founder and managing director of the AI Whistleblower Initiative. “Lawmakers should not waste the opportunity to get AI whistleblower protections right on their first try,” they write.
• Ellen P. Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School and co-Director of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, asks what it would take to actually democratize AI at each layer of the stack, starting with compute—the layer Zuckerberg's latest manifesto skips.

Technology and the global political economy

• Brazil, home to the world's second-largest rare earth reserves, saw its Goiás state enact its own minerals policy and sign a memorandum of understanding with the US granting joint ownership of strategic data. The Goiás initiative was challenged on several fronts and ignited a debate over sovereignty. Tech Policy Press fellow Tatiana Dias and Maurício Angelo of the Mining Observatory investigate.
• Human Rights Watch senior economic inequality adviser Sarah Saadoun explains how a century-old physical-presence rule in bilateral tax treaties lets tech giants earn fortunes in countries while paying tax elsewhere—and how a new UN treaty could finally change that. “It is a landmark opportunity for governments to come together to decide on a better global tax system, one that also adequately deals with multinational tech companies,” she writes.

What we’re watching

• Varsha Bansal will be following the Meta trial closely for us, but we invite other analyses and perspectives on the trial and its implications. We’re also following other relevant litigation, such as the US Department of Justice’s $400 million settlement with TikTok over child privacy concerns, announced Friday.
• One more thing before I sign off: next week, we'll be announcing an opportunity that has shaped much of what you read in this newsletter — and that we hope will continue to bring new voices into the conversations and debates Tech Policy Press is committed to advancing. If you're a journalist, researcher, or public policy professional who cares deeply about tech policy and democracy, or if you have someone in mind who does, next week's newsletter is one you won't want to miss, as it will contain the call for our next fellowship cohort.

Until then, I wish you the best for the week ahead!

-Justin