430+ cybersecurity experts have warned that mandating digital IDs to access lawful speech online "breaks the internet's security model." NetChoice's Digital Safety Shield takes a different path: fund law enforcement, expand digital literacy, empower parents.

NEW MYTH, BUSTED: Big does NOT automatically mean bad. Big usually just means successful at serving customers. The real danger is a company that stops innovating. Just ask Sears.👇

Kalshi Joins NetChoice as Coalition Expands Into New Sectors of the Digital Economy WASHINGTON — Kalshi, the federally regulated financial exchange, has joined NetChoice, a national technology trade association focused on promoting free enterprise, free expression, and innovation across America’s digital economy. Together, Kalshi and NetChoice will work to champion an environment where prediction markets can thrive as a part of the digital ecosystem. “America has always been at its best when entrepreneurs have the freedom to innovate and consumers have the freedom to choose,” said @Kalshi CEO @mansourtarek_. “That’s why we’re proud to partner with NetChoice to protect those principles and ensure Americans can participate in the next generation of financial markets.” “We are excited to welcome Kalshi as a member as we expand into new sectors of the digital economy," said @SteveDelBianco, President and CEO of NetChoice. “NetChoice works to make the internet safe for free enterprise and free expression — prediction markets sit at the intersection of both. We look forward to working together to defend the freedom to innovate and compete.” NetChoice represents companies across the technology sector to ensure that the principles that enabled America’s internet economy to flourish continue to extend to its newest participants. The organization educates policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels about the digital economy and advocates for a policy and legal environment that protects the rights of consumers, promotes competition, and allows innovators to thrive. Unlike a sportsbook, where the house sets the odds and profits when customers lose, Kalshi is a peer-to-peer exchange where users trade directly with one another on the outcomes of future events. Prices are set by the market, not the platform, giving consumers a transparent alternative built on the same principles as any other financial exchange. Kalshi is leading a new era of markets that are open, accessible, and driven by the people who use them.

NEW video series alert! 🚨 Follow along to learn more from @pat_hedger as he debunks common antitrust myths.

Don't miss NetChoice's @corbinkbarthold on the Hill tomorrow with @NetCaucusAC discussing all things AI and speech. ⚖️ Register here ➡️ buff.ly/fE6hdxy

Digital ID mandates don't stop a predator. They create a permanent record of every website a teenager visits and hand hackers a single, lucrative target to breach. 🚫 NetChoice's Digital Safety Shield does the opposite: fund police, expand digital literacy, empower parents.

Roughly 1 in 8 U.S. teaching positions are unfilled or staffed by uncertified teachers. AI tools are stepping in to fill that gap, flagging in real time where a student is struggling and personalizing instruction that used to require a private tutor. 🧑‍💻

Amazon moved Prime Day from July to June this year. Walmart and Target just didn't watch from the sidelines; they launched competing sales timed to overlap, and both saw a boost in foot traffic. One retailer created the shopping moment, yet the whole industry benefited. 🛍️

Loudoun County, VA, collected $895M in property tax revenue from data centers in 2025 — enough to cut homeowners' tax rate every year for a decade. Strip that away, and the average homeowner's bill jumps $5,800 a year, a 91% increase.

VA hosts more data centers than any state, & they draw over 20% of the state’s power. If data centers actually spiked your electric bills, VA would show it. Instead, its rates tracked the national average, while CA's jumped nearly 40% with barely any data center growth at all.

Data centers save the average Loudoun County, VA homeowner $5,800 a year in property taxes. Without the added revenue they provide, the average bill would be 91% higher. This is what hosting the world's largest data center market actually looks like for residents. 👏

Louisa County, VA cut its personal property tax rate thanks to data center revenue. Near Atlanta, data centers turned land worth tens of millions into more than $2 billion in taxable value — funding new schools and water systems. Learn more about data center benefits at: buff.ly/e167az6

Prince William County, VA, now spends 82% more per resident on education, all while cutting its property tax rate. The reason: data center tax revenue in the county grew 349% over 15 years. Learn more about the communities benefiting from data center tax revenue at ➡️ buff.ly/Hlzj6Z4

NetChoice Applauds Senate Commerce Committee Markup of the JAWBONE Act 👏 WASHINGTON—The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is marking up several bills today, including the JAWBONE Act (S. 4749), bipartisan legislation from Sens. Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden to combat government coercion of online speech. NetChoice previously voiced its support for the JAWBONE Act when Sens. Cruz and Wyden first introduced the legislation in June, and welcomes today's progress as the bill moves closer to a full Senate vote. "Today's markup moves us one step closer to giving platforms a genuine legal remedy to defend their right to make editorial decisions, free from backroom pressure by government officials," said @ZacharyLeeLee, Director of Government Affairs at NetChoice. "Americans and the services they rely on deserve a clear path to hold bureaucrats accountable in court when they cross the line from persuasion into coercion. We are glad to see the Committee recognizes how urgent this is." By providing a framework to distinguish between legitimate dialogue and unconstitutional coercion, the JAWBONE Act ensures that law enforcement can continue to work with platforms to protect consumers while empowering those same platforms and citizens when the government oversteps its bounds and violates the First Amendment. NetChoice applauds the Committee for advancing this critical bill, which takes concrete steps to protect the First Amendment, and encourages the full Senate to swiftly advance it.

Abraham Lincoln once worked behind the counter of a general store. Sears once shipped entire houses by rail. Today, AI is helping small businesses do what shopkeepers did 250 years ago better: know their customers. Some things about American retail never change. 🇺🇸

Loudoun County, VA, cut its property tax rate for 10 years running thanks to data centers. Cheyenne, WY, collects $11M a year in local taxes from Microsoft alone. Pryor, OK's school tax base grew 168% because of Google. This is happening in communities across the country. 👏

1 WEEK AWAY: Congress is confronting a threshold question on AI — when does regulating AI mean regulating speech? Join @NetCaucusAC's Hill briefing on chatbot outputs, transparency mandates, & model restrictions, featuring NetChoice's @corbinkbarthold.

Henrico County, VA, started a $60 million housing fund using data center tax revenue — and has already put $8.3 million toward first-time homebuyers, funding 750 affordable homes. That's real money helping real families. 👏

ICYMI: NetChoice sued IL on Friday over its Social Media User Tax & Digital Ad Tax. These taxes stand in direct opposition to federal law, violate the First Amendment, & raise a host of other constitutional problems. 🚫 Learn more at ⏩️ buff.ly/UPxisRD

Grocers have marked down day-old bread at closing time for decades. Airlines have priced by demand since deregulation. Electronic shelf labels and algorithms just made it faster and more precise. Calling that "surveillance pricing" only makes it a scandal in search of evidence.

Digital ID mandates create a record of who reads what online, handing hackers a honeypot of personal data. 🪪 NetChoice's Digital Safety Shield offers a different path: funding law enforcement, expanding digital literacy, & empowering parents. No surveillance required.

At full capacity, Wiwynn's expanded facility near El Paso will employ 4,000 people building the server infrastructure behind AWS. This is what the AI build-out actually looks like on the ground: American factories employing American workers, strengthening American supply chains.

🚨NEW LAWSUIT: NetChoice Sues Illinois Over Unconstitutional Social Media User Tax and Digital Ad Tax SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — NetChoice today filed two complaints against the State of Illinois to block enforcement of two newly enacted tax provisions, the Social Media User Tax and the Digital Ad Tax. Both measures unconstitutionally and discriminatorily single out digital services, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the federal Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (PITFA). "Illinois’ new internet taxes firmly establish the state’s opposition to online speech, innovation, and its own business community,” said @Paul_Taske, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “The Supreme Court has made abundantly clear that legislators cannot target a subset of media for disfavored taxation, but that’s precisely what these taxes do. Not only are they flatly unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but they blatantly disregard Congress’s clear judgment under PITFA that digital services cannot be subject to discriminatory taxation.” A Tax on Audience Size Is a Tax on Speech The Social Media User Tax imposes fees on platforms based on the number of Illinois users they reach, exempting services with fewer than 100,000 users while penalizing those with larger audiences. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that the government may not tax one category of speaker more heavily than another. Illinois' Social Media User Tax follows the same blueprint NetChoice is already challenging in NetChoice v. Chicago, a pending suit over the city's own per-user Social Media Amusement Tax. Both Taxes Run Afoul of Federal Law Both the Social Media User Tax and the Digital Ad Tax are in direct violation of PITFA, the federal law by which Congress expressly barred states from imposing "discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce." Both taxes apply exclusively to online services while leaving comparable offline counterparts — social clubs, community centers, professional associations, and traditional advertising — untouched. This is precisely the sort of digital-only taxation Congress intended to preempt, and similar laws, including Maryland's Digital Advertising Tax, have already been struck down by courts on comparable grounds. Real Costs for Illinoisans and Their Small Businesses Because the Social Media User Tax is a flat fee untethered to a company's actual revenue or profit in Illinois, some services may choose to limit or exit the Illinois market altogether — cutting residents off from vital communication, educational, and community-organizing tools they rely on daily. Local businesses, including restaurants, auto dealers, and community organizations, will also face higher costs to reach customers through online ads under the new Digital Ad Tax. This tax raises the cost of doing business, costs that are likely to be passed on to Illinois consumers, and harms entrepreneurs’ ability to grow.

Twenty-five years ago today, the world changed. We remember the 2,977 people who lost their lives, the families who have carried that loss ever since, and the first responders and everyday Americans who ran toward danger to help total strangers. Never forget.

A new peer-reviewed study across all 50 states, based on data from 2021–2024, found no statistically significant link between data center presence, capacity, or expansion and rising residential electricity prices. The "AI is spiking your power bill" narrative isn't holding up to the data. 🚫 Learn more here ➡️ buff.ly/iKVnanm

Data centers cover 38% of Loudoun County, VA's budget. They sit on just 4% of the county's business land — and pay $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they use. Loudoun's homeowners have received property tax cuts for ten years running because of it. 👏

New data from @TheEconomist estimates that AI has so far created around 1 million new jobs in America. Many of which have come from data center buildout, growing startups & brand new AI-specific roles at existing orgs. 👏 Read more about it at ⏩️ buff.ly/c9GTl2h

Data center tax revenue is helping to fund schools in New Albany, OH: one data center's taxes kept the school district out of budget cuts. DeKalb, IL: $72M in new revenue built a school. Mecklenburg County, VA: $90M for new elementary schools. Quincy, WA: a new high school.

Waymo's driverless cars show 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries than human drivers — verified by NHTSA, Swiss Re, and the insurance industry's own IIHS. Yet Teamsters-backed bills in MA, IL, and DC still require a human "backup" driver anyway.

Google's data center in Lenoir, NC didn't just bring jobs — it started a $2 million fund to lower energy bills for Caldwell County residents. The facility is now the county's largest taxpayer. This is what a data center looks like up close. 🔍️

Meta's Nebraska data center campus, a $2.5 billion investment, is giving back $4.1 million to Sarpy County schools and nonprofits while supporting more than 300 local jobs. This is what data centers do for the communities that host them. 👏

VA hosts more data centers than any state in the country. If they were driving up electric bills, VA's ratepayers would feel it most. Instead, their rates tracked closely with the national average — while CA's spiked nearly 40% with barely any data center growth at all.

Grocers have marked down day-old bread at closing time for a century. Electronic shelf labels that adjust automatically based on data inputs have just automated it. Calling that "surveillance pricing" doesn't make it a new or harmful business practice. 🚫

New research tracking actual AI spending, not guesswork, found that companies investing the most in AI grew headcount by 10.2% over two years — and entry-level hiring grew 12%. The "AI is killing jobs" panic is running ahead of the data.

Loudoun County, VA, collected $895M in property tax revenue from data centers in 2025 — enough to cut homeowners' tax rate every year for a decade. Strip that away, and the average homeowner's bill jumps $5,800 a year, a 91% increase.

Foreign regimes don't need to touch a US company's servers to control American speech — they just need a court willing to issue a fine, then hand it to a US court to enforce. Rep. Michael Rulli's GRANITE Act shuts that door. No foreign censorship judgment should ever run through an American courtroom. 👏

Do data centers pay taxes? Yes — and they are some of the most reliable taxpayers a local government can have. 👏 Learn more below ⤵️

A single Kentucky data center could generate up to $435M in local tax revenue over 12 years — $222M of it for schools. That's just one NetChoice release from August. Find Court wins, analysis of the GRANITE Act, and more in this month's Net Gains ⏩️ buff.ly/wEaNsqN

Digital ID mandates hand hackers a honeypot of personal data just to prove you're old enough to read a webpage. 🪪 Our Digital Safety Shield offers a real fix: funding law enforcement, expanding digital literacy, & empowering families with the tools to protect their kids.

August was a big month for digital freedom. We released new research & notched three separate courtroom wins for free speech and free enterprise. 👏 Get the full recap in this month's Net Gains, out now ➡️ buff.ly/wEaNsqN

How is Congress confronting AI's biggest constitutional question: when does regulating AI mean regulating speech? ✍️ Catch NetChoice's @corbinkbarthold on a @NetCaucusAC panel discussing the issue on Sept. 22nd: buff.ly/CkP1F8r

The EU just fined X $140M for content that's fully legal to post in America, and nothing currently stops that judgment from being enforced in a US courtroom. The GRANITE Act would close that loophole. Congress should pass it now. 👏

NEW: President Trump's Justice Department has filed its first brief on AI and copyright. In a federal court filing for the New York Times' case against OpenAI, the administration argued that training AI models on published text is fair use and consistent with a key purpose of copyright law: promoting innovation. NetChoice applauds the administration for supporting American AI leadership. fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gf…

NetChoice's monthly newsletter, Net Gains, covers the biggest fights happening for free speech, privacy, and innovation online — straight to your inbox. 📥️ Subscribe now at ➡️ buff.ly/qloMFG9

Walmart+ now delivers Subway. Uber One just added 700,000 hotels through Expedia. Amazon Prime bundles in Grubhub+, Whole Foods, and its new AI-assisted Alexa+. The subscription itself has become the product, and everything stacked on top is just one more reason not to cancel.

The FTC's Amazon Lawsuit Is a Case in Search of a Problem 🔍 WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission this week sued Amazon over its Sponsored Ads auction practices, escalating a case that traces back to the agency's Lina Khan-era investigation into Amazon's acquisition of iRobot. "This lawsuit is a case in search of a problem,” said @abos255, Vice President of Government Affairs at NetChoice. “The FTC has not shown any demonstrable harm to consumers, yet it is spending taxpayer resources chasing a technical dispute instead of addressing the affordability problems Americans actually care about. This is exactly the kind of ideological enforcement voters have told us they want regulators to move past." Amazon's own response makes clear the company made a good-faith effort to keep its advertisers informed, reviewing and updating educational materials about its auction system as it evolved. Simplifying explanations for customers and correcting them when they become outdated is standard business practice. Nowhere in the FTC's complaint is there a demonstration that any of this raised prices for the consumers the agency claims to be protecting. NetChoice's own polling found that 72% of Americans want regulators focused on lowering prices, not punishing successful companies — a sentiment that held firm across party lines. Lawsuits like this one send the opposite signal: that the FTC would rather relitigate a years-old grievance against a single company than address the cost-of-living concerns voters are actually raising.

NetChoice Commends House Subcommittee Passage of Bipartisan Satellite Streamlining Bill WASHINGTON—Today, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology advanced the Satellite and Telecommunications (SAT) Streamlining Act (H.R. 8255), bipartisan legislation from Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) that directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to put firm shot clocks on satellite licensing decisions and cut the red tape that’s slowing the deployment of next-generation satellite broadband. "American satellite companies shouldn't have to wait years for the government to say yes, and NetChoice applauds Chairman Guthrie and Ranking Member Pallone for their bipartisan leadership in moving this bill through the subcommittee today," said @ZacharyLeeLee, Director of Government Affairs at NetChoice. "Clear deadlines for licensing, renewals, and modifications mean faster deployment of satellite broadband to underserved communities across the country, and stronger protections against foreign interference give American companies the certainty they need to keep investing and innovating. As the Senate’s companion effort cleared the Commerce Committee earlier this year, we are glad to see the House moving in step. We urge the full Committee and the House to swiftly advance this bill.”

The EU just fined X $140 million for content that is fully legal to post in America — and nothing currently stops that judgment from being enforced in a US courtroom. Rep. Michael Rulli's GRANITE Act closes that back door: American courts would be barred from enforcing foreign censorship judgments against American speakers. 👏

Where does AI regulation stop touching conduct and start touching speech? That's the question Congress needs to answer before it writes AI rules that don't survive a courtroom. ⚖️ Join NetChoice's @corbinkbarthold at the @NetCaucusAC Hill briefing on chatbot outputs, transparency mandates, and the constitutional lines AI policy can't ignore.

NEW: Foreign governments are using their own courts to punish American speech that is fully legal here. Rep. Michael Rulli's GRANITE Act says U.S. courts will not help enforce those judgments. As we write: "American courts should never become the enforcement arm of foreign censorship regimes." netchoice.org/guarding-ameri…