Opinion · Frederick County Conservative Club
Spoiler: It’s you. And if you live near Adamstown, you may be paying with your backyard too.
By Maude Franceschina
You’ve probably heard a lot lately about Artificial Intelligence “AI.” It’s everywhere. Your phone uses it, your search engine uses it, and now apparently the people who want to run your school board are talking about it too.
It is not a question of “do you ..” anymore it is “which one do you..”
The tech companies behind AI are worth trillions of dollars and their founders are household names. So here’s a question nobody seems to be asking out loud: if these companies are so fabulously wealthy, why did we pay to build what they’re selling?
Because we did. Every foundational technology that makes AI possible, the internet itself, the basic research behind neural networks, the semiconductors, was developed with taxpayer dollars, through universities, DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and decades of federally funded research. ( Not by Al Gore as we know) The scientists who cracked the code on how these systems learn were working in publicly funded labs. The data that trained these models? Generated for free by ordinary people using the internet every day. You. Me. Your kids.
The profits, though? Those are private. Very, very private.
“We built the foundation. They built the penthouse. And now they want to charge us rent.”
Now comes the part where it gets personal for Frederick County. The Board of Elections just approved putting a new data center zone near Adamstown on the November ballot as a referendum. Data centers, the massive warehouse-sized facilities that power AI, require extraordinary amounts of electricity and water to operate. They don’t create many local jobs. They do chew up open land, strain local infrastructure, and drive up energy costs for everyone nearby. And they tend to show up in communities that don’t have the political clout to say no.
How do these corporations get around local concerns? The same way they always do. They hire lobbyists, cultivate relationships with state-level politicians who can override local zoning, offer modest tax incentives that look good in a press release but rarely pencil out for taxpayers long term, and wait for opposition to lose steam. By the time most residents figure out what’s happening, the permits are signed.
Here’s what bothers me most about the AI conversation as it’s happening right now. The same people who would howl (rightly) at the government funding a failing steel mill or a money-losing airline are perfectly comfortable watching billions in public research dollars get quietly absorbed into the balance sheets of trillion-dollar tech companies. That is socialism, friends. It’s just socialism with better branding and a Silicon Valley zip code.
And the dependency these companies are building? It’s intentional. Make the tool indispensable, make the free version just good enough to hook people, then start charging. The folks who can afford the premium version, the lawyers, the consultants, the corporations, get a genuine edge. Everyone else gets the stripped-down version and falls a little further behind. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business model. And it has been used before.
The NIH funds the basic research that discovers a new drug compound. A private pharmaceutical company licenses it, develops it, and charges Americans ten times what the same drug costs in Canada.
The internet started as ARPANET a military and university project paid for by taxpayers and ended up as a handful of private platforms that now control how information flows to every household in America. Public investment, private profit. Rinse and repeat.
Even our electric grids started out this way. Now we are plugged into private companies and a captive audience.
There are two things ordinary people can push for that would actually help.
First, open source AI technology that anyone can use, inspect, and run without paying a subscription to a billionaire needs to be supported and protected. Some companies, like Meta, have released open versions of their models. That competition keeps the others honest and keeps the technology accessible. Second, any AI-generated content political ads, news summaries, school board endorsements should be clearly labeled as such. If you can’t tell a human wrote it, you deserve to know a human didn’t. Transparency is not a radical idea. It used to just be called honesty.
“Transparency is not a radical idea. It used to just be called honesty.”
As for the data center vote coming up in November, pay attention to it. Ask your county council candidates where they stand. Ask who is funding the campaigns of anyone who supports fast-tracking approvals for these facilities. Follow the money. It tends to lead somewhere interesting.
Second? We have a chance in Frederick County to be thoughtful about this rather than reactive. The communities that get steamrolled by this kind of development are usually the ones that weren’t paying attention until it was too late. We have a referendum. Use it.
The people building the AI future are very smart, very rich, and very focused on their own interests. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pretending it’s philanthropy. We paid for the foundation of this technology with our tax dollars and our data. We deserve a seat at the table not just a bill.
