Big tech companies tend to make a lot of enemies — but there are none more powerful than the US government. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta are regularly called in front of Congress to fend off monopoly accusations — and lawmakers bring up bills to rein in the companies just as often. The Federal Trade Commission has taken a particularly central role, leading a lawsuit to sever Facebook and Instagram while blocking new acquisitions for Oculus and the company’s virtual reality wing. Like it or not, these regulatory fights will play a huge role in deciding the future of tech — and neither side is playing nice.
The pro-data center Republican Byron Donalds has won the race for governor, according to the AP. He beat Democrat David Jolly with just over 50 percent of the vote — a far tighter margin than predecessor Ron DeSantis in 2022.
Democratic candidates touted their credentials taking on the tech industry far more than in prior election cycles, an analysis by public policy group Reset Tech finds. Between 2020 and 2024, only two Democratic ads used the phrase “Big Tech.” From 2025 to 2026, that number was 154.
A county election official asked the election board for approval to rescan ballots from two scanners experiencing equipment issues. One scanner seemed to wrongly display that it had a paper jam, CBS News reports, while another displayed an error after a voter accidentally rolled over its cable with a wheelchair.
The nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition says it’s received over 8,000 hotline calls today, but the reported concerns are fairly standard for large elections. Rev. Dr. Katie Sexton Wood, executive director of the Arizona Faith Network, says there’s been no verified reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) near Arizona polling spots.
State officials got reports that DOJ monitors asked poll workers in Dearborn for their training materials, Michigan Attorney General office spokesperson Danny Wimmer confirms. The DOJ’s team overseeing Michigan monitors told state officials such actions were not part of their training, Wimmer says, and that the team would follow up.
But in a statement to The Verge, DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels says the questions monitors asked were “typical questions about election official training” that are standard on forms provided to monitors and the same as those asked under the previous administration. Pels added that the DOJ has not confimed that monitors have asked for training materials, but told Michigan officials they’d remind monitors they can ask about training, but “don’t need to request training materials.”
Update: Added DOJ statement.
In Florida, more than 20 polling sites are being moved due to intense flooding. Storms in the Southwest have also impacted some polling locations in Colorado, Newsweek reports, while Utah will let some voters impacted by flooding return ballots electronically, and Arizona officials are warning voters to check travel updates.
Polling sites across Westchester County are experiencing an issue with their voting machines, but officials say residents can still safely cast their ballots. Election officials have a backup protocol in place to ensure voting can continue.
[New York Times]
The nonpartisan coalition running the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline says the calls range from asking about general information, to reporting long lines, lack of signage, or voting equipment issues. Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York account for the most calls. So far, no calls about federal agents at the polls.
Federal election monitors are a standard procedure, but this year the Trump administration has expanded it to the “largest monitoring effort in history.” States have prepared to make sure they don’t interfere, as the administration has taken several steps this year to assert more oversight of state-run elections.
Bipartisan outrage has been growing for months — but Republicans’ many advantages could still help them win.
As tech billionaires pour record millions into Maine’s high-stakes Senate race, rural voters push back against the resource strain, rising utility costs, and phantom jobs of the AI data center boom.
In July, the LAPD suspended its use of Flock’s cameras over concerns about how the company was handling its data. Now it’s rolling out hundreds of ALPRs from competitor Axon. The company has so far escaped the backlash Flock faced, but it’ll likely face growing scrutiny as it fills the gaps left by canceled Flock contracts.
JerryRigEverything belatedly got hold of a Trump phone for a midterm special durability test, including a blunt recounting of the president’s track record so far. It features more evidence that the T1 Phone is an HTC in disguise, including a repeat of iFixit’s clever trick of swapping motherboards to prove the phones are identical inside and out.
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
“The Gemini app answers this question more fully but this isn’t the most helpful response on Search,” Google says in a response to the Bluesky user who posted the unhelpful search answer. “We’re looking into this and working to address it.”
A few of us at The Verge weren’t able to recreate it, but Ars Technica has a good rundown of the situation with some of its own testing.
OpenAI is the latest tech company (and according to Politico, the first major AI company) to set up a command center for fighting election misinfo and abuse of its systems, approaching the second major AI-era US election:
The Election Operations Center will begin running this week until all votes are counted, to identify the potential spread of misinformation or other efforts to disrupt the elections. It’s meant in large part to combat abuse of the company’s own tools like ChatGPT, monitoring real-time events and fielding reports of unexpected behavior from models or cases of suspected violations of their platform’s terms.
Some are even mad enough to vote for Democrats.
Under the law, AI companies must block chatbots from pretending they’re humans when chatting with a user under 18. They also restrict other inappropriate conversations with kids, including those that involve flattery, unprompted emotional questions, and encouragement surrounding secret-keeping.
The law requires AI companies to verify the ages of users and include “at least one option that does not depend solely on government ID.” Last month, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani banned younger schoolkids from using AI.
The president asked when The Wall Street Journal would swap the term for “Super Intelligence.” Legally, he can only force executive branch agencies to make the switch, but in a Truth Social post, he says he’ll soon “be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy.”
Some midterm races come down to ‘people who hate data centers’ versus ‘people who hate them even more.’
Blackburn (R-TN) said the updated terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts,” according to Reuters.
Following publisher pushback, Meta delayed the enforcement of these new policies until November 20th.
According to Reuters’ sources, the FTC was investigating Shein over “delivery delays and other customer complaints,” adding that the settlement would be “equivalent to 44% of Shein’s second-quarter profit.” The European Union also opened an investigation into Shein earlier this year over concerns about “addictive design” features and illegal product listings.
And no, you haven’t forgotten about a line of Intel-made Roombas. It requested permission to make hardware changes to the “Automatic Guided Vehicles” it’s used in semiconductor facilities for two decades. It says replacing the machines could take years, and there are no domestic alternatives. The FCC agreed, giving it permission to update its bots for the next year.
Trump asked Musk on Wednesday to fully roll back the interruptions that neither has publicly taken responsibility for, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Today, the WSJ says the system is working “more normally” after the call, citing US and Ukrainian officials.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Some Indian American conservatives say bigotry against their community has driven them away from the party they once supported.
Instead, their money went to a political action committee that funneled the money to the reelection campaign of Colorado’s Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper. According to The Atlantic:
The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print. And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.
The court-ordered change takes effect from March 1st 2027, following similar rulings in the EU, Japan, and Brazil. Apple will have to let Fortnite back in the App Store too — one of the last holdouts after a global return — and allow developers to offer alternative payment methods. Apple told Reuters it plans to appeal.
[Yahoo News Australia]
Continuing to push the widely unpopular data center projects, Trump said in a Truth Social post that some of them “have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.” His plan sounds lot like Meta’s approach on the Hyperion project in Louisiana, where Mark Zuckerberg has touted $50,000 bonus checks for teachers despite a secretive approval process residents didn’t know much about.
