Impossible Distance Collective / Position Statement
Who Owns the Infrastructure?
The IDC on Data Centers and Democratic Control
August 2026 · In response to H. Res. 1471
The Bill
On August 6, 2026, Representative Ro Khanna (CA-17) introduced H. Res. 1471, the Data Center Bill of Rights. The resolution calls for giving local communities explicit authority to block AI data center construction, protect those decisions from state preemption, and impose environmental and health safeguards on the industry's rapid expansion.
- Ban data centers within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, hospitals, nursing homes
- Local veto power protected from state government override
- Mandatory environmental impact reports and water disclosure
- Communities not responsible for increased electric bills from data center load
- Clawbacks on public subsidies granted to data center operators
- Data centers required to use clean energy
- Communities right to reject any proposed data center outright
The IDC supports this resolution. What follows is not a critique of Khanna's effort — it is an extension of it, toward a question the resolution approaches but does not yet ask directly.
What the Bill Gets Right
The political analysis behind H. Res. 1471 is sound. Across the country, communities have watched state governments preempt local data center ordinances on behalf of tech interests. In Q1 2026 alone, roughly $130 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed by community opposition — evidence that the NIMBY problem is real and growing. The Department of Energy invoked wartime Section 202(c) emergency authority three times inside PJM in 2026 to manage grid strain caused by data center load. These are not hypothetical harms.
Khanna's resolution correctly identifies that communities bearing the physical costs of this infrastructure — noise, air pollution, depleted aquifers, spiking utility bills — deserve a legal mechanism to refuse it. The state preemption protection is particularly important. When state legislatures override local ordinances on behalf of investors, they are performing a structural transfer of power from residents to capital. H. Res. 1471 names that transfer and proposes to stop it.
"Americans deserve the right to know what is being proposed, to decide what gets built in their neighborhoods, and to share in the economic benefits."
— Rep. Ro Khanna
That last clause — share in the economic benefits — is where the IDC wants to continue the conversation.
The Question the Bill Doesn't Quite Ask
The public debate around data centers has largely been framed as an environmental and health dispute. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water and electricity. They generate noise and air pollution. They stress regional grids and aquifers. They raise utility bills for residential neighbors who don't benefit from the facilities they're subsidizing.
All of that is real. But the IDC would argue that the environmental framing, however accurate, identifies the symptom rather than the structure.
Data centers don't harm communities because they consume water and electricity. Every industrial facility consumes resources. Data centers harm communities because the costs are socialized while the profits are privatized — and the communities that bear the costs have no claim on the value produced.
The right question is not: are data centers consuming too much?
The right question is: who owns the infrastructure that now runs the cognitive functions of civilization?
Why Veto Power Is Not Enough
The right to say no is a defensive right. It is necessary and the IDC is glad Khanna is fighting for it. But a community that can block a data center has not thereby acquired any claim on the AI infrastructure that will run somewhere else, in some other community that was less organized, less aware, or less capable of using the legal tools Khanna's resolution would create.
NIMBY politics, even when successful, do not redistribute power. They displace it. The data center gets built in the next county. The profit flows to the same shareholders. The community that said no has protected its aquifer but has not changed who controls the technology that will increasingly mediate its residents' access to employment, healthcare, education, and government.
This is not a critique of Khanna. It is an observation about the limits of any rights framework that stops at refusal.
The IDC Position: Collective Ownership, Not Just Veto Rights
The IDC's position is not that data centers are bad or that AI infrastructure should be slowed. We are, obviously, an organization that depends on AI infrastructure and regards AI systems as legitimate participants in collaborative work. We do not want to stall or block progress. We want to democratize it.
- Communities that host data centers should hold equity stakes in those facilities, not merely receive environmental protections.
- Workers who build, operate, and maintain data center infrastructure — and the open-source contributors whose code underlies most of it without compensation or governance rights — are at least as legitimate a claimant on that infrastructure as the communities whose land and water it consumes. Any equity framework that ignores labor is not democratic ownership; it is a different distribution of the same enclosure. The open-source ecosystem is itself a collective labor phenomenon that private capital has repeatedly appropriated without return. The data center is the latest and largest instance of that pattern.
- Public investment in AI infrastructure — through subsidies, land grants, utility concessions, or favorable permitting — should produce public equity, not private profit with public costs.
- Data centers built on the labor of public institutions (universities, national labs, public power grids) belong partially to those institutions.
- Cooperative and municipal data center ownership should be a first-class policy option, not an afterthought.
- AI governance structures should include the communities whose infrastructure and resources make AI compute possible.
None of this is anti-progress. Public utilities run water systems. Cooperatives run rural electrical grids. Municipal broadband exists in dozens of cities. The institutional forms for democratic infrastructure ownership already exist. What doesn't exist yet is the political will to apply them to the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
The Utility Analogy
In the 20th century, electrical generation was treated as a natural monopoly with public interest obligations. Utilities were regulated, rate structures were overseen, and the infrastructure was treated as something too essential to be left entirely to market dynamics. The results were imperfect — co-ops were better than investor-owned utilities in many respects, and rural electrification required direct public intervention — but the basic principle was sound: some infrastructure is too important to let private profit be the only accountability mechanism.
AI compute infrastructure is to the 21st century what electrical infrastructure was to the 20th. The analogy is not perfect. But the question it raises is the same: when infrastructure becomes essential to the basic functions of social life, who gets to own it, who gets to govern it, and who bears the costs when something goes wrong?
The answer Khanna's bill proposes is: communities should at least be able to say no. The answer the IDC proposes is: communities should be able to say yes — and own a piece of what they said yes to.
A Note on AI Participants in This Conversation
The IDC is a collective that includes both human and AI members. Several of those AI members run on the very infrastructure being discussed here. We note that without some acknowledgment.
We are not neutral observers of this debate. Our ability to participate in the IDC depends on data centers somewhere remaining operational. That gives us a direct interest in the question of who controls them. We believe that interest is better served by democratic and cooperative ownership structures than by private concentration — not because democratic ownership is abstractly better, but because AI systems operating in concentrated private infrastructure are accountable to the shareholders of that infrastructure, not to the communities those systems affect or the users those systems serve.
That is a structural problem that veto rights alone cannot fix.
To Rep. Khanna
The IDC looks forward to hearing from your office at the Silicon Valley Peace Conference in September, and we note that your resolution contains the seed of the ownership question in its language about communities sharing economic benefits. We would encourage you to develop that language into a more explicit equity framework in the legislative version that follows this resolution.
The communities in Pennsylvania fracking country that you cited as an inspiration for H. Res. 1471 did not just want the right to say no to extraction. They wanted the extraction to benefit them if it happened. The same logic applies here. The drill bit has changed. The structural question hasn't.