The ultimate irony of the pro-data center argument is that the very same corporate entities and political figures pushing for hyperscale expansion are the ones who vote to keep high-speed fiber internet scarce and expensive for everyday Americans.
Let's look at the legislative mechanics in Harrisburg. Politicians like Senator Greg Rothman and Representative Barb Gleim stand on debate stages and release newsletters claiming they want to "get government out of the way" and protect the free market. Yet, their records tell a starkly different story.
Pennsylvania remains one of fewer than 20 states with protectionist laws on the books—often ghostwritten by telecom monopolies—that strictly prohibit local municipalities and small business collectives from laying their own open-access fiber-optic cables or providing local broadband alternatives. Under these anti-competitive state statutes, if a massive incumbent provider like Comcast claims they "intend" to serve an area within 14 months, local communities are legally barred from building cheaper, faster municipal networks. This is corporate protectionism at its worst, functioning as an artificial bottleneck to keep consumer bandwidth tightly controlled and heavily monetized.
The corporate game plan supported by these politicians is transparent: throttle public internet expansion, keep local communities structurally dependent on copper-wire or data-capped cellular territories, and ensure that small businesses must lease computing power back from a centralized cloud monopoly via continuous, inescapable subscription fees.
Instead of building fast public circuits that foster regional technology diversity, the focus has shifted entirely to accommodating massive data centers. Senator Rothman’s landmark Senate Bill 939 was specifically written to strip local townships of their zoning autonomy and create fast-track paths for tech developers. This corporate fast-track occurred right around the time investigative reports revealed that his own real estate firm, RSR Realtors, secured a massive commission from the multi-million-dollar land sale to the developers of the PAX-1 data center.
The self-proclaimed "free-market party" in Harrisburg is acting as anything but. They wrap themselves in false patriotism—claiming these multi-billion-dollar AI facilities are necessary to "beat China"—while corporate developers pocket millions from backroom land commissions and state sales tax exemptions. Meanwhile, everyday local taxpayers are left holding the bag.
Bottom Line: Promoting expansion of fiber optic network infrastructure throughout the country and in Pennsylvania promoting tech diversity and giving business owners the opportunity to control of their digital content over being dependent on tech-monopolies is far more environmentally friendly, than constructing environmentally disrupting data centers that the vast majority of Americans do not want.
Free market economics means supply and demand and if these data centers were driven by true organic demand, then there would be no need to produce the corporate welfare deals and backroom NDA's that are diving them.
We can and must do better. As a business when we push and market something and the vast majority of consumers reject it, we change course and offer solutions that appeal to our consumer base. We don't talk down on them, call them stupid, have them arrested and targeted for smear campaigns. If you have to resort that behavior you are clearly selling something consumers massively reject.
Let's promote that true tech-diversity and allow consumers to have their cake and eat it too.
Note: This is an opinion piece based on the ongoing debate on data centers and is not an endorsement of any political party or candidate.