A demonstrator wearing a yellow vest waves the French flag on top of a burning barricade on the Champs-Elysees avenue with the Arc de Triomphe in background in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

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Building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, with the EU-flag.

Building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France

European Parliament Divided on How to Govern AI At Home and Abroad

People with their mouths taped participate in a protest against internet shutdowns, arrests, and executions in Iran outside the Palacio Nacional de Belem in Lisbon, Portugal, on May 10, 2026. (Photo by Luis Boza/NurPhoto via AP)

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A rally against data centers at R.K.Beach in Visakhapatnam, India, on July 19. Source: Stop Dirty Data Centers

A rally against data centers at R.K.Beach in Visakhapatnam, India, on July 19. Source: 

What India’s Forest Rights Act Can Teach Us About Data Centers

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Four policewomen detain and carry a protester during a demonstration demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in New Delhi, India, Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

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A gaming console. (Photo by Romain Doucelin / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

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Illustrative photo captured during the plenary session of October 2025 in Strasbourg, France.

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An illustrative photo of a man walking through the corridors of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

Behind the scenes - European Parliament in Strasbourg

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Supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at an election rally on Oct 11, 2026 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Rodilei Morais/Fotoarena/Sipa USA)

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Image Authentication Should be a Condition of AI Decisions

Since its launch, Tech Policy Press has covered the findings of the annual Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House, a nonprofit organization founded in 1941 to advance democracy and human rights. As we noted 

, it is typically grim reading, a chronicle of governments suppressing dissent, people arrested for nonviolent expression, tallies of those attacked or killed for their online activities, and other threats to internet freedom.

It should come as no surprise to our readers that the topline results in this year’s report correspond to more of the same, as authoritarianism continues its advance across the planet. Freedom House finds that “Global internet freedom declined for the 16th consecutive year.” Among the most significant developments was Iran, which, amid demonstrations that rocked the country earlier this year and the subsequent United States and Israeli military strikes on the country, “imposed the longest nationwide internet shutdown Freedom on the Net has ever recorded.” In Russia, the Putin regime “consolidated control over internet service providers (ISPs),” further restricting internet access and introducing new censorship measures.

But the problem goes far beyond these worst offenders: only 9.1% of the world’s internet users live in countries that Freedom on the Net considers “free.” The US remains in that increasingly lonely category, but it has seen its standings decline substantially over the years. Owing to mass surveillance of online activists by federal authorities, prosecution of journalists who reported on protests against immigration enforcement activity in Minnesota, and “steeper penalties on people for their online activities” in various parts of the country, the US scores 73 on the 100-point scale, just four points from the “partly free” category.

World map titled “Freedom on the Net 2026” from Freedom House, showing internet freedom ratings for the 38 countries assessed. Nine countries are rated Free: Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Estonia, France, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Fifteen are rated Partly Free: Bangladesh, Brazil, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Nigeria, Serbia and Ukraine. Fourteen are rated Not Free: Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey and Venezuela. All other countries are shown as not assessed. A note says territories that Freedom House assesses separately in its Freedom in the World report are excluded from the country assessments.

One prominent trend driving concern over internet freedom, according to Freedom on the Net, is the global proliferation of measures to restrict children and teens from accessing certain online content. (Tech Policy Press is tracking this trend in its 

Global Social Media Age Restriction Tracker.

) These policies often come with requirements for age assurance, which the report says “has become a pressing rights and cybersecurity issue.” Pointing to Turkey and China, Freedom on the Net says these laws “open a new vector for abuse, with identification requirements enabling bad actors and repressive governments to create a footprint of people’s online activities.”

The report warns that age checks relying on facial scans, government-issued identification or other sensitive personal data can threaten privacy and anonymity. It also points to evidence that children have continued to access social media despite new restrictions. Policymakers and technologists who seek to implement age assurance in a rights-respecting manner will need to work together to overcome technical obstacles and to mitigate the privacy and security risks, according to the report.

 on the threats that artificial intelligence — and often, attempts to regulate it — poses to internet freedom. Pointing to measures across multiple countries targeting the use of AI for online harassment and impersonation, as well as mitigation measures such as labeling AI-generated content, Freedom on the Net says some “raised concerns about overreach.”

India, for example, introduced rules requiring prominent labels on AI-generated content while shortening the period in which platforms must remove content flagged by authorities from 36 hours to three hours. Civil society groups warned that the shorter deadline could encourage platforms to remove legitimate journalism and satire rather than risk penalties. In Mexico, authorities arrested two online journalists under a law restricting certain uses of AI-generated images and voices, despite a carveout for journalism.

Where there is good news, it stems from “mass movements that overthrow repressive leaders,” such as in Bangladesh and The Gambia. Bangladesh’s status has steadily improved since a popular uprising led to the removal of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2024. It recorded the largest improvement for the second consecutive year and experienced its first year without an internet shutdown in a decade.

The Gambia continues to see improvement since it ousted Yahya Jammeh nearly a decade ago. The report credits reforms to censorship rules and the passage of a data protection law in December 2025. The report lauds the use of digital tools to mobilize pro-democracy movements in India, Iran, Hungary, Serbia, Kenya and Cuba, noting these movements are often met with state violence and retaliation.

Every year, the report comes with a list of policy recommendations. These are much the same as prior years, insofar as they address internet shutdowns, the need to instill “accountability mechanisms and normative frameworks to disincentivize the misuse of surveillance tools,” the need to improve digital security safeguards for journalists and human rights defenders. A new recommendation this year calls for support for satellite internet access.

The report also urges policymakers to put internet freedom at the center of decisions about agentic AI, systems that can carry out tasks with limited human intervention. As these systems become more widely adopted, societies will face choices about how to configure the internet around them. Freedom House says those decisions should preserve open exchange and free expression as fundamental values.

Freedom House adapts to a new funding reality

Close readers of our prior coverage of the report will know that, for years, Freedom on the Net was substantially funded by the United States government under its portfolio of projects to advance democracy and human rights. That portfolio was decimated in the first year of the Trump administration, and Freedom House 

 after cuts to State Department-funded democracy and internet freedom projects “

, the funding cuts affected Freedom House’s ability to produce the Freedom on the Net and sustain its network of more than 200 internet freedom defenders. The impact is evident in this year’s report, with the organization no longer able to work with researchers and local organizations across all the countries assessed, instead relying on staff-written summaries and consulting independent experts on only a subset of them.

This year’s report says it was funded by “the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Google, the Internet Society, and the New York Community Trust, as well as through a partnership with the Rutgers Democracy Lab (RDL).” The methodology section of the report suggests this new constellation of supporters did not provide enough funding to sustain the same approach used in years past.

“We've made good progress to stabilize Freedom on the Net in this new funding environment, though it required the difficult decision to scale back the scope of the 2026 edition,” said Kian Vesteinsson, deputy director for research at Freedom House and one of the authors of Freedom on the Net. “As in previous years, our network of partners in the global digital rights community played an important role in informing and validating the findings. I'm optimistic that more donors with a strong commitment to the transformative power of the internet will step in to ensure the project's long-term health, particularly as agentic AI makes research on digital rights all the more urgent.”

European lawmakers want global AI rules but clash over regulation at home.

 global AI governance in Strasbourg on Thursday, calling for deeper international cooperation to manage AI risks, including through engagement with the United States and China. But the debate also exposed divisions over how far governments should go in regulating AI and how much responsibility should fall on the companies developing it.

The disagreement extends to Europe’s own approach. Brussels defended its decision to withdraw the AI Liability Directive after lawmakers 

Addressing the plenary on Thursday, European Commissioner for International Partnerships Jozef Síkela argued that international engagement was essential because "artificial intelligence knows no border." He pointed to existing forums for joint discussions, such as the G7, G20, the United Nations AI summits, OECD, Council of Europe, and the Network of AI Safety and Security Institutes. Nevertheless, the EU wants “to team up and to advance work on model evaluation, verification, peer-reviewing, AI security, and much more."

The debate showed broad political support for international cooperation on AI, including with the United States and China, with several lawmakers comparing the technology's potential risks to those of nuclear weapons. "We have to start talking to people that we don't agree with, and that means talking to China,” said Irish lawmaker Michael McNamara, rapporteur of the 

, adding the EU also needs to speak with “sometimes allies in the United States.”

German lawmaker Sergey Lagodinsky backed that approach, proposing an agreement built on the 

 that would establish binding rules and include both the United States and China. “We need a strategic AI restraint treaty, like we used to create for arms control,” he said.

But lawmakers were divided over how to achieve that cooperation and whether Europe should prioritize tighter safeguards or the competitiveness of its AI industry.

For Greens and Socialists, leaving the rules to major AI companies would be a mistake. German MEP Alexandra Geese, from the Greens, warned that technology "cannot be governed by a blog post," referring to 

 from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the risks of advanced AI, which was 

 by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's State of the Union speech. Geese also cited former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees who 

 about how financial incentives lead to avoiding oversight.

Sharing some of those concerns, Maltese Socialist, Alex Agius Saliba 

 self-regulation. “With the AI Act and the GDPR, the European Union has led the way on AI governance. Now we must turn that leadership into global action by convening a Global Forum that brings together the US, China, and other major technological powers,” he said. However, he criticized both the withdrawal of the AI Liability Directive and proposals to ease the use of personal data for AI training, discussed in yesterday's Council position on the 

However, the Swedish center-right lawmaker and co-rapporteur on the AI Omnibus, Arba Kokalari, accused Greens and Socialists of living on a "different planet" for demanding more regulation while European developers fall behind their American and Chinese competitors. "If we want to shape the global rules of AI, we must also lead in developing AI," she said. Lagodinsky pushed back, pointing to reports of autonomous AI agents escaping their testing environments and increasingly sophisticated hacking capabilities as reasons to strengthen safeguards.

The debate over safeguards also produced calls for an international oversight mechanism. German conservative Axel Voss proposed an international inspection regime modeled on the International Atomic Energy Agency, including mandatory testing before AI systems enter the market, incident notification and liability requirements. Earlier in October, the Committee for Constitutional Affairs 

d a proposal calling for an AI agreement inspired by nuclear non-proliferation.

The calls for international cooperation came alongside renewed pressure on the Commission to reconsider its decision to withdraw the AI Liability Directive, which lawmakers argued would have helped people seek compensation when AI systems cause harm.

Síkela said the Commission had supported the directive but faced resistance from national governments." There was a big reluctance by the Council to take this forward, there was no agreement between the co-legislators, and it was not expected that an agreement would be reached soon," he said. He pointed to the AI Act and the revised Product Liability Directive as legislation that already covers certain aspects of liability.

But critics argue those laws do not resolve all the problems victims face when trying to prove that an AI system caused harm.

 with Tech Policy Press, Italian Member of the European Parliament Brando Benifei, one of the AI Act's lead negotiators, said the regulation does not provide a general civil liability regime because fines may sanction the infringements without compensating victims. The directive’s withdrawal leaves unresolved difficulties in proving fault and causation, particularly when AI systems make autonomous decisions.

“The problem is not the technology. The problem is big AI companies being reckless by chasing corporate greed,” said Dutch Green MEP Kim van Sparrentak. She argued for holding AI companies to the same standards as other manufacturers. “If a phone charger explodes in your house, we never call it innovative. We call it cheap, dangerous junk, and we hold the manufacturer liable for damages. So why do we let Silicon Valley get away with it?”

In 1909, Barcelona appeared to be ablaze. Anarchists set fire to churches, convents, and monuments in revolt against Madrid's war in Melilla, and the journalist Antonio Loredo, watching from a window in Gràcia, gave the burning metropolis a name in the Argentine newspaper 

became shorthand for a Catalan capacity for revolt, and for the state's habit of answering revolt with brute force.

 returned to European streets, this time in France, where protestors have utilized the same tactics as their predecessors to the south. Students and yellow vests in 

 lycées, roundabouts, and refineries, with a refrain similar to Barcelona’s 

: rights, education, and a future for their young.

At the same time, the French government uses modern tools to surveil these disruptions, including spyware placed on organizers’ phones, app takedowns, and algorithmic cameras that scan crowds for potential “violent events.” These new algorithmic tools force us to question what remains of our democracies: how violence is determined, and where disruptive dissent belongs in the future of protest in the technological surveillance state.

, brought that question to Catalonia’s streets. Spain's Supreme Court had sentenced 

nine Catalan leaders to between nine and 13 years in prison

, and a movement called Tsunami Democràtic mobilized within hours, shutting down 

 at the French border for 30 hours, and setting dinner tables across the asphalt at 

. The protest was organized through Telegram, Instagram, and a custom app that sent protest coordinates to its users' phones. Its 

 explicitly committed participants to nonviolence: "We are predisposed to accept suffering rather than inflict it. We will not respond violently if we are attacked."

The state responded by recasting the movement as a security threat. The Guardia Civil 

, describing Tsunami as "a criminal organization that promotes terrorist attacks," and GitHub 

 after the takedown order. Citizen Lab later documented 

 connected to the independence movement targeted with Pegasus and Candiru spyware, among them lawyers, civil society leaders, and developers of digital voting tools. A terrorism investigation into Tsunami ran for nearly five years before it 

 in July 2024. By then, the movement had been surveilled, deplatformed, and labeled terrorist, and it had never been convicted of anything. And yet, the organizers of the movement promised “Ho tornarem a fer,” or “we will do it again,” a call to exercise the right to protest even in the face of legal challenges.

The Catalan case brings us back to the age-old conversation around nonviolence. In his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence,” 

 warned that nonviolent resolution may never fully succeed in changing the law, because the law rests on the state’s power to carry out and enforce violence. 

, claiming that violence can destroy power, but never fully create it. When the state reaches for a rubber bullet or a water hose, the means start to swallow the ends they were supposed to achieve. Judith Butler’s more recent 

furthers this idea, locating the strength of nonviolence in its refusal to accept the frames that decide whose lives are important enough to mourn. 

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek brings this conversation into 2026. Subjective violence, like a burning dumpster, is easy to see with the plain eye. However, the system violence of the state typically stays invisible, and that invisibility is precisely what makes a burning dumpster look like a riot.

organizers built theories of nonviolence into their infrastructure, not only in their doctrine, but in their organizing platform architecture – their app only activated when an existing member scanned a QR code, after which it sorted participants into small local cells, and released each action’s location shortly before it began, similar to 

 utilized for canvassing in the United States. This hyperlocal and real-time structure allowed for trusted communities to organize for disruption rather than planned violence. And yet, the movement was still met with force from the 

, Catalonia’s own regional force. It was also met with a subtler violence that tracked them on the same network their apps were hosted upon – a new surveillance system, first coined by 

, with the capacity to know and shape behavior by rendering human experiences as data. While Tsunami lived on Telegram, Instagram, and GitHub, this did not exclude them from state apparatuses focused on extracting, storing, and tracking their data as movements.

This fall, a new wave of unrest brought the same tensions into focus in France. The student movement 

 outside a lycée in Créteil, where demonstrators protested teacher shortages, deteriorating school buildings and the pressures of Parcoursup, the algorithmic platform used to allocate higher education places.

 1,027 lycées affected and 222 blockaded. On October 17, the yellow vests joined the students, and the ministry counted 550,000 people across 110 marches, a mobilization which ran on a 

. Visitors pinned roundabouts, toll booths, refineries, fuel depots, train stations, and schools. The map asked for no name or address, routed volunteers to a Telegram channel, and promised to delete every listed action after December 31. By the morning of the protest, it 

. It did for France what Tsunami's app did for Catalonia, caching no accounts, no identities, and packaged with an expiration date. However, public maps are legible to everyone, including the state – so each pin that told a volunteer where to go also informed the police.

Quickly, the day turned violent. Masked protesters set a fire that largely destroyed the 

 1,200 arrests and 150 injured police officers – arrests have since reportedly reached 

 called the use of force against the student movement disproportionate. The government, for its part, attributed the movement to an operation by the 

 and its proxies, a familiar move that recasts a mass mobilization as a manipulation. Internationally, 

 were quick to frame the protests as an anomaly and a warning to the far-left, in advance of elections in the United States.

, which extends the country's experiment with algorithmic video surveillance through the end of 2030 and widens the places where it can run. The Constitutional Council upheld it, noting that the system excludes facial recognition, as per the 

. Instead, the system detects predetermined "events" in crowds, and the state decides which events are violent.

However, this predetermination was only selective on paper, because in March 2026, the investigative outlet 

 revealed that police and gendarmes had been using facial recognition software on their 

 since at least 2022, which matched faces photographed during identity checks to the TAJ criminal records database, which holds up to 

. Among those scanned was a protester stopped as he left a gathering at 

 investigation found that the practice continued daily, months after the 

. Officers’ own testimony indicated that it fell hardest on young people from working-class neighborhoods, people perceived as foreign or as visible minorities, and environmental and left-wing activists. The EU AI Act may restrict biometric identification in public space, but the phones in gendarmes’ pockets tell another story.

France is one front of a wider shift. On the same day, protests over wages, rents, and education 

spread to Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Albania

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni urged the country

 that no one has a right to set cities ablaze. Portugal's parliamentary affairs minister said the government 

"will not yield to shouts from the street."

Europe’s legal groundwork is shifting in ways that narrow the space for disruptive protest. Italy's 2025 security decree 

 such as blocking a road with one's body, offenses the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner warned were "defined in vague terms." The United Kingdom proscribed the direct-action group Palestine Action under terrorism law in July 2025, and police then 

 for holding signs in its support. Tsunami's dinner tables at La Jonquera would now be considered a crime in Italy, and its app would also become evidence in prosecution.

The pattern is not that every protest is nonviolent, or that governments should ignore arson and assault. It is that states can use broad security classifications and technical systems to extend their response from violent acts to the movements, tools and people associated with disruption.

First, platforms that host protest-coordination tools should publish government removal requests and explain their decisions. Where legally permissible, they should require a court order before disabling tools used for lawful assembly.

Second, the European Union should treat spyware deployed against civil society, lawyers, and journalists as a violation of the fundamental rights the EU Charter guarantees, with independent forensic review and effective remedies available to anyone who suspects infection.

Third, algorithmic video surveillance should be barred from public demonstrations. France's Ripost law leaves the definition of a suspicious "event" to the state. At minimum, any permitted use must have a clear legal basis, independent oversight and meaningful avenues to challenge surveillance decisions.

Fourth, protest tools should practice data minimization by design. The yellow vests' map, which collects no names and deletes its records at year's end, offers a working model, though organizers must also assess the risks created by location data and messaging platforms.

When Picasso was asked by a German officer standing before 

, "Did you do this?", he is said to have replied, "No, you did this." European governments face a similar challenge. The fires are real, and violence must be addressed. But so is the infrastructure that determines which gatherings are suspicious, which organizers become targets and which forms of dissent are treated as threats.

 to support a $15 billion project to build a 1GW 

 to 601.4 acres across three sites — Tarluvada (266.6 acres), Adavivaram (160) and Rambilli (174.8). The capacity appears to have grown as well, with clearance papers 

 upon the eco-sensitive zone of the Kambalakonda sanctuary and being in proximity to the Mudasarlova reservoir, the project was granted environmental clearance in just nine days. Since then, 

, as in the world at large, planned data center projects are drawing 

 from local communities, who bear the real 

 and do not foresee the promised gains of an AI future trickling down to them.

States have begun to deploy policy instruments to address public concerns. However, solutions that only consider better engineering or cleaner impact metrics miss the point. This is not just a technical problem, it is also a problem of governance. A data center is a claim on land and its resources, and therefore a claim on people. Its policy, thus, must be anchored primarily in the politics of place, because scratch the surface and you will find data centers to be fundamentally a 

 of articulating and fighting for land rights.

No legal instrument represents this history better than the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, better known as the 

. It recognizes land and resource rights of forest-dependent communities, defined in its preamble as those “who have been residing in such forests for generations but whose rights could not be recorded.”

, critical resources are being extracted from communities to power a global digital system that directs the flow of value elsewhere. The FRA legacy provides us with the working grammar to confront this new form of colonialism and reaffirm pre-existing rights of communities. The grammar can be unpacked in three important rights articulated in the FRA — the right to land, right to resources, and right to development.

Right to land (individual and collective rights)

In the Vizag campus, two hundred of the 480 acres of the project belong to around 

 of Tarluvada village. The land was given to landless Dalit farmers in the 1970s through a special program. This program is another example of the Indian state’s attempts to correct historical injustices, especially considering that a 

 revealed that 68% of Dalit households in Visakhapatnam district still do not own land.

 that they were not consulted when the decision was made. They say that the Open Category (OCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) negotiated the surrender of their land, with 

 of land-pooling and acquisition processes being used to put further pressure on them. They believe that the dominant castes withheld details from them and targeted Dalit lands specifically.

It is exactly these types of power asymmetries in land and livelihoods that the FRA combats. By allowing land-dependent communities to collectively claim rights, the FRA sets an important precedent. It expands not just the definition of customary land rights but also the process for making claims. Under 

, people can claim individual or collective forest rights for land they occupy and cultivate. Claims begin in the gram sabha, not the revenue department, and oral testimony and customary knowledge are permissible evidence.

The Act restricts itself to forest land. However, its methodology of making individual and collective claims can be adopted more broadly. If applied to data centers, it would translate into allotment of land only after land claims are formally recorded so that structured negotiations happen with actual right-holders.

Public consultation should also be mandated for data centers above a defined threshold. But how do you define that threshold? In Vizag’s case, due to the lack of categorization of data centers in the 

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notification of 2006

 under Category B2 instead of assessing the whole project under Category A. As the Notification does not mandate public consultation for B2 projects, no hearing was conducted.

Such obfuscation can be avoided if data center policies mandate cumulative assessments of projects and the EIA notification is amended. But more importantly, public consultation around data centers should draw on the FRA’s model of deliberation through local institutions.

As rights under the FRA are place-based, claims and grievance redressal processes are triggered at the village level. If communities could lodge individual and collective claims to the land and resources on which they directly depend, and utilize them to demand accountability, consultation would follow regardless of the project category. If the state continues to insist on opening its land to tech conglomerates, granting rights to land-dependent marginal groups will allow them to protect their livelihoods more effectively.

Right to resources (use/management rights)

Hyperscale data centers cannot function without existing IT infrastructure. They are also resource-intensive, requiring an uninterrupted supply of power to run servers and freshwater to cool them. This naturally makes 

 like Vizag attractive for data center clustering.

 that a 1GW facility requires 20 million liters of freshwater per day (MLD), while a 

 of a comparable size calculates it at 33 MLD. For Vizag, a 

 reports current water supply at 330-400 MLD and demand at 400-490 MLD, and warns that data centers and other industrial projects could push demand to 1500 MLD by 2040.

 claims that the campus will use air-cooling instead. But that only adds to its already intensive energy consumption. The environmental clearance for two sites of the campus 

 a combined grid draw of 1626 MW and 354 backup diesel generators with a combined capacity of 971.5 MW. Even a conservative estimate of a steady draw of 

) would be comparable to the energy demand of 3.9 million Indian homes (as calculated in the 

Vizag's climate already strains the existing 

. Yet instead of prioritizing municipal needs, the state government has enabled the grant of 

 to data centers, allowing them to procure and distribute power independently. The 

 questions the legality of this policy, calling it a “backdoor attempt to privatize an important component of electricity distribution.”

The bottom-up response to this can begin with an articulation of the right to resources. 

 states that right-holders can “ensure that the decisions taken in the Gram Sabha to regulate access to community forest resources and stop any activity which adversely affects the wild animals, forest and the biodiversity are complied with.” Extending the FRA logic to urban and peri-urban communities would ensure, at minimum, participation of local leadership in the governance of urban resources.

Right to development (local developmental rights)

The ecological significance of the geography magnifies every harm the Vizag campus brings, and activists have enough global evidence to raise concerns.

Data centers’ water use has been studied as 

 not only aquifer depletion but also pollution. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 

 the murky brown water from taps in Morgan County, Georgia, attributing the problem to the nearby data center. Air-cooled facilities can be harmful. In Uruguay, for instance, 

 is projected to release 25,000 tonnes of CO2 and 86 tonnes of hazardous waste. Data centers cause significant increase in 

The Andhra Pradesh IT minister Nara Lokesh has tried to alleviate these concerns by 

 that the government plans to mandate data centers to source 70% of their energy from renewable sources. He also 

 the public that only industrial water will be used for data centers. But how does the government plan to scale the currently lacking 

 capacity to meet the demands of a hyperscale campus? And absent project-specific impact assessments, how would we know these interventions are sufficient?

The clamor for on-ground transparency brings back the core missing piece in ensuring state accountability — place-based land governance. One of the FRA’s greatest contributions is its recognition of the gram sabha as the central decision-making body. Once a claim under the FRA is recognized, the gram sabha is empowered to not just manage land resources but have agency over what is developed on the notified land.

Applied to data centers, this suggests two concrete policy reforms. First, local bodies must hold decisional agency over what land gets allotted for data center use (if at all), and second, if claims remain unrecorded or impacts are not assessed, formal village-level channels should be created to challenge site approvals.

 states that right-holders “ensure that the habitat of forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers is preserved from any form of destructive practices affecting their cultural and natural heritage”. 

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