Cities Push Back on Surveillance and Data Centers While Right-to-Repair Scores a Win

At least 50 U.S. cities have dropped contracts with Flock Safety, the license plate reader company, after it emerged that data collected for local law enforcement purposes was being shared with federal Border Patrol and immigration enforcement. Cities that originally purchased Flock systems for traffic safety and crime reduction had not, in the view of local officials and ACLU advocates, signed up to become nodes in a federal immigration surveillance network. The 50-city cancellation figure reflects a mainstream community governance response rather than a fringe concern.

Separately, local governments from Maryland to Washington state are imposing moratoriums on data center development over concerns about power consumption, water usage, noise, and a gap between assessed tax value and actual community benefit. Prince George's County in Maryland, one of the highest-concentration data center markets on the East Coast, approved a two-year moratorium. A single hyperscale data center can draw between 100 and 500 megawatts — comparable to a small city — making the power grid implications concrete rather than theoretical.

John Deere's FTC right-to-repair settlement is significant for farmers and the broader movement alike. Deere had restricted access to diagnostic software and repair tools in ways that forced farmers to use authorized dealers — sometimes waiting weeks during critical planting or harvest windows. The settlement opens those tools directly to farmers, and its broader significance lies in applying FTC enforcement capacity to embedded software restrictions in physical equipment, setting precedent for repair rights in medical devices, consumer electronics, and industrial machinery.

The settlement illustrates an important antitrust distinction: the Sherman Act prohibits not dominant market position itself, but the acquisition or maintenance of dominance through anticompetitive conduct. Deere's decades-long market leadership in agricultural equipment was not the legal problem; using software locks to restrain competition in the adjacent repair services market was. States preparing to sue over a potential Paramount-Warner Bros. combination are making an analogous structural argument — not that the merged entity would be large, but that combining two of the five remaining major Hollywood studios would confer pricing power over content licensing that would harm streaming competitors and consumers.

Waymo's expansion to four new cities arrived paired with a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warning to self-driving car firms about emergency scene interference — specifically situations where autonomous vehicles block first-responder access in ambiguous circumstances, incidents that have been documented in San Francisco. NHTSA is signaling that continued expansion requires demonstrated improvement on that specific failure mode before further approvals.