The petition pointed to studies indicating that in the US airline sector some “mergers raised fares not just on overlapping routes but also on non-overlapping routes.”

Charter/Cox competition not completely absent

The petition also referenced remarks from the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office, which noted that Charter and Cox do directly compete in parts of their service areas. The California Public Advocates Office submitted a protest in the state regulatory proceeding in September 2025, stating:

The Joint Applicants assert that Charter and Cox have no, or very few, overlapping locations, so the Proposed Transaction will not harm competition. However, FCC broadband data show that Charter and Cox California have 25,503 overlapping locations. At 16,485 of these locations (65%), Charter and Cox California are the only two providers offering speeds of at least 1,000 Mbps download.

If the Proposed Transaction is approved, customers in those areas will have access to only a single provider for high-speed service and will have no meaningful choice between providers. Finally, Charter is already the sole provider of gigabit service in 48% of its service area, while Cox is the sole provider in 65% of its service area. Consolidating these footprints would significantly expand Charter’s monopoly power in the high-speed fixed broadband market.

Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer said that the Carr FCC “did not require Charter to do anything it wasn’t already planning to do.” He contrasted that with the FCC’s 2016 approval of Charter’s merger with Time Warner Cable, which allowed Charter to become the second-largest cable company in the US.

“In 2016, the commission approved Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable only after imposing conditions on data caps, usage-based pricing, and paid interconnection,” Bergmayer said on Friday. “Today’s order finds those concerns no longer apply, largely because the agency credits fixed wireless and satellite as competitive constraints on cable. Further, the Commission imposed no affordability conditions, despite doing so in the 2016 Charter, Comcast-NBCU, and Verizon-TracFone transactions. The record does not support this outcome.”

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 12 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast, the parent company of Ars Technica.

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Mandating a water study provides, at minimum, a basic picture of nearby water supplies and how they behave around proposed data center sites. That information is something the state of Iowa generally lacks, said Cara Matteson, a former geologist and Linn County’s sustainability director.

DNR staff told Matteson that water information collected in Linn County by qualified researchers on behalf of a data center applicant would be factored into state permitting and enforcement decisions.

The department told Inside Climate News by email that it would make use of the extra local water data.

If a data center’s application is approved, developers would sign an agreement with Linn County specifying terms for water-use monitoring and reporting to both the county and the DNR. The pact could also contain drought contingency measures.

Still, the county’s ability to act on the water-monitoring data it seeks is limited. The DNR not only issues water-use permits but also imposes penalties for permit violations.

Nichols said Linn County’s zoning rule was revised several times in response to questions raised by people attending the first two public readings.

From its initial reading to final adoption, the ordinance expanded to add language setting light-pollution standards, requiring a waste-management plan, including the Iowa DNR in the water-use agreement to address possible well interference, and mandating an applicant-led public meeting before any zoning commission hearings.

“I am very confident that no ordinance for data centers in Iowa is asking for more information or asking for more requirements to be met than our ordinance right now,” Nichols said at the final reading.

The Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance has stated it strongly supports current and future data center development in the region. Nichols said the new ordinance does not amount to an effective moratorium and that he “strongly believes” a data center can be built under the adopted framework.

Google spokespeople did not reply to requests for comment.

New rules may lead data centers to locate elsewhere, acknowledged Brandy Meisheid, a supervisor whose district includes many of Linn County’s smaller communities. But Meisheid said the ordinance is intended to protect residents, not developers. “If it’s too high a price for them to pay, they don’t have to come.”

Anika Jane Beamer reports on the environment and climate change in Iowa, concentrating on water, soil, and CAFOs. A lifelong Midwesterner, she writes about shifting ecosystems in one of the continent’s most altered landscapes. She earned a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish from Grinnell College. She is a former Outrider Fellow at Inside Climate News and was named a Taylor-Blakeslee Graduate Fellow by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

This story first appeared on Inside Climate News.

Likewise, after an unintended flooding incident in the lab, scientists recorded an exceptionally prolonged multiday torpor in a golden spiny mouse, its body temperature falling to about 75°F (24°C).

Geiser says this greater flexibility in using torpor allows heterotherms to ride out catastrophic events. By contrast, homeothermic species can’t simply cut back their need for food and water and may be unable to endure prolonged adverse conditions.

“Perhaps there’s no food, perhaps no water, perhaps it’s very warm,” says ecophysiologist Julia Nowack of Liverpool John Moores University in England, a coauthor on the sugar glider study. Torpor, particularly in tropical regions, has “many different triggers.”

Different kinds of threats, such as predators, can also lead animals to lie low. The (aptly named) edible dormouse, for example, will sometimes enter extended periods of torpor in early summer. At first researchers were puzzled—why sleep through summer when temperatures are mild and food is plentiful, especially if it means missing opportunities to reproduce?

After examining years of data gathered by multiple teams, two researchers concluded that because spring and early summer are peak activity times for owls, these small, easily eaten animals were likely choosing to be torpid at night, safely concealed in underground burrows to avoid becoming prey. In a similar strategy to evade nocturnal predators, Fjelldal’s bats modify their torpor use slightly with the lunar phase, remaining torpid longer as the moon brightens and they grow easier to detect.

The fat-tailed dunnart, a mouse-like carnivorous marsupial native to Australia, is another species that stays subdued when predation risk increases. In one study, researchers placed dunnarts in two enclosure types: some with abundant ground cover created by plastic sheeting to simulate predator-protected habitat, and others with little cover to simulate higher predation risk. In the higher-risk enclosures, the animals foraged less and their body temperatures became more variable.