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Direct Message News

Direct Message News is the byline under which DMNews publishes its editorial output. Our team produces content across psychology, politics, culture, digital, analysis, and news, applying the Direct Message methodology of moving beyond surface takes to deliver real clarity. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, sourcing, drafting, fact-checking, editing, and review, rather than a single writer's work. DMNews takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial standards.

Arizona lawmakers passed a three year moratorium on data center tax breaks to slow the industry down, and in the two weeks before it took effect developers filed nearly as many applications as they had in the previous thirteen years combined

Texas passed a law banning targeted ads to minors, and a federal judge has now struck it down in a second ruling that went further than his first, ruling it violated advertisers’ free speech rights

Connecticut, Arkansas, and Utah made their comprehensive privacy laws enforceable on July 1, adding a new wave of state-specific consent and opt-out rules for marketers to track this year

Marketing automation platforms spent the first half of 2026 compressing the time from insight to campaign launch from days to minutes, and the fight nobody is naming yet is over who owns that layer of intelligence, not who owns the software

Zeta Global tracked what AI shoppers do before they buy — seven in ten still complete the purchase on the brand’s own site, but the data suggests AI has already shaped which brand that would be

Illinois directed its economic development agency to stop processing new data center tax deals starting this July, after lawmakers left Springfield without passing the reforms the governor asked for

Indiana disclosed this year that more than 93 percent of its data center tax exemption went to a single company, with that one recipient’s share increasing by 1,011 percent in a single year

Virginia projected its data center tax exemption would cost $1.5 million a year when it was created in 2008. In fiscal 2025, the state’s own report put the actual cost at $1.9 billion — a gap that has become a reference point in data center tax debates in more than a dozen other states.

AI has not solved marketing’s measurement problem, it has raised the stakes, because boards now expect proof of ROI at the same time as the tools that were supposed to provide it have made attribution harder to defend

Ohio suspended its data center tax break after the cost to the state hit $1.6 billion — eleven times what legislators had approved — making it the first major US state to pull back on AI infrastructure incentives over actual fiscal cost

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