It feels like the beginning of an inflection point that plans for a gigantic data center are being abandoned after years of litigation trying to block it.
The story, as told by Etiido Uko at Tom’s Hardware, is that the last of several stakeholders has abandoned the Virginia Digital Gateway, which was going to be the world’s biggest data center. It died on a technicality: the public had not been properly notified before Prince William county’s Board of Supervisors ruled to rezone the site.
The 2,100-acre project, Elroy Fernandes says at Startup Fortune, would have occupied 22 million square feet – per the developers, the equivalent of 144 Walmart supercenters. It was opposed by historical societies and local residents because it abuts the Manassas Civil War battlefield.
The site, Fernandes writes, was meant to expand the Northern Virginia Data Center Alley, which processes 70% of global Internet traffic. He suggests that the case sets a precedent that “land use fights…can kill a fully approved project after years of sunk legal and engineering costs”, is a new bottleneck to add to access to power.
Protesters elsewhere may take heart. As Ed Zitron frequently rants, the cost, number, and size of data centers being planned is staggering, especially given their unpopularity. In Pennsylvania, where 66 data centers are planned or being built thanks in part to tax incentives, the Republican candidate opposing governor Josh Shapiro’s reelection is making a moratorium on data centers part of her platform. In London, the plan to convert an old brewery into a data center occupying 5,200 square meters to enable high-frequency trading is opposed by both residents and the local council, who would rather prioritize affordable housing. In Tennessee, Texas, and Seattle (where testifying Amazon employees say the company is investigating them), have passed moratorium bans to give local governments time to study the issues they raise.
Like Wall Street in 2011 (Occupy) and Google’s buses in 2016 (see Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus), data centers provide physical targets that consolidate the spreading anger over growing inequality, Silicon Valley values, climate change, and AI in general. This could be an unpleasant fight going forward: the US FBI is beginning to fret about anti-tech extremism.
It seems that two 15-year-old boys were having fun in a Waymo robotaxi in San Mateo, California, drinking alcohol and firing Orbeez out of the windows until they were detained by police. According to AP News, Waymo – presumably a remote human *at* Waymo – pulled the car into a parking lot and called the cops. The San Mateo police department said the car remained unlocked and the teens could have left the vehicle.
The reactions are many and varied. One friend calls it “kidnapping”. The Register calls the car a snitch. Another friend calls Waymo’s behavior entirely justified and says the teens got what they deserved. The Daily Mail calls the car a “tattle-tale”. A separate issue is the police response: four officers with guns drawn.
At The Register, Connor Jones notes the open question: how were the teens able to rent the car? This in itself is interesting because a few years back, everyone imagined that self-driving cars would open up unaccompanied car travel to people who can’t drive – like kids and visually impaired people.
The incident opens a box of worms. Waymo’s in-car cameras and mics enabled staff to detect what was happening, divert the car, and call police with its GPS coordinates. There will be much debate about finding the line between stopping dangerous behavior and violating passengers’ privacy. The discussions we’ve had for the last decade about social media will now find their analogue in the physical world.
In February 2007, I wrote about legal actions brought by a once-large company, the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).for the Guardian summarizing the complex history because the case was about to end. SCO’s four-year-old claim – that IBM had infringed its copyrights on UNIX by contributing code to Linux – had spread to Red Hat and the now-defunct networking company Novell.
By August, it was over: the judge ruled that SCO had no claim to UNIX code.
And then it wasn’t. Instead…the sadly defunct Groklaw went on covering the case in detail until 2013. In 2016, I noted that somehow “SCO” (trying to follow “SCO” through mergers and owners is like trying to win the shell game) was paying Boies, Schiller, and Flexner to file yet another appeal. That appeal, Wikipedia says, was dismissed in 2018, and it was finally settled in 2021.
But hark! What’s this thing rising, clanking and covered with slime? On Monday, Simon Sharwood reported that by the 2021 settlement “SCO” had sold its software to Xinuos, and…somehow it’s all alive again. In a hearing on June 22 – 2026! – they argued about whether Xinuos has the right to litigate this at all. One assumes someone hopes that IBM or Red Hat could be forced to pay a lot of royalties *if* their versions of Linux are ever found guilty of infringement.
This is our modern Jarndyce and Jarndyce. As Dickens said, “a scarecrow of a suit”.
Illustrations: Manassas Battlefield National Park (via Wikimedia.)
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
Point of order:
There were 2 different companies using the initials “SCO”.
The original, “the Santa Cruz Organization”, trading as “SCO”.
And what was formerly a legitimate Linux vendor, Caldera, which bought part of the former and renamed itself “The SCO Group”.
They were _not the same company_ and they did not have the same name.
It would be much better if you clearly distinguished SCO from The SCO Group.
I thought I had with the comment about the shell game and the quotes around “SCO” later in the piece.
wg