Actively and appropriately balancing the rights of Montanans against the needs of government to address actual harms is precisely what government in a free society should be doing.
The following is a copy of a letter we sent to Yellowstone County legislators on September 24, 2026, in response to a letter sent to legislators by the Yellowstone County Commission regarding the Right to Compute Act.
September 24th, 2026
RE: Response to Yellowstone County’s request to revise the Right to Compute Act
Dear Yellowstone County Legislators,
You may have received a letter from the Yellowstone County Commission asking the 2027 legislature to rewrite Montana’s Right to Compute Act (MCA §§ 2-10-201 to 2-10-207) so local governments can regulate “data centers and similar commercial facilities” without the Act’s standard of review. We urge you to decline that invitation.
First, as the group that drafted the Right to Compute Act, we must correct the record. The Right to Compute Act does NOT prevent County governments from enacting an ordinance or citizens from qualifying an initiative to regulate data centers.
What the Right to Compute Act does is protect Montanans’ right to own and use computers by recognizing this as an extension of our fundamental, God-given rights to think, express ourselves, and make use of our tools (our property). That includes the right to own and use computer hardware, software, and algorithms for lawful purposes.
Montana’s recognition of the Right to Compute creates a strong likelihood that preemptive, category-wide restrictions on the lawful use of computers that are not narrowly tailored to a real public health or safety harm will be struck down if challenged in court.
This is a healthy standard, the same one courts use for government restrictions on free speech. Actively and appropriately balancing the rights of Montanans against the needs of government to address actual harms is precisely what government in a free society should be doing.
Here’s what the Act actually says:
“Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens’ fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.”
“Compelling Government Interest” is defined as:
(2) “Compelling government interest” means a government interest of the highest order in protecting the public that cannot be achieved through less restrictive means. This includes but is not limited to:
(a) ensuring that a critical infrastructure facility controlled by an artificial intelligence system develops a risk management policy;
(b) addressing conduct that deceives or defrauds the public;
(c) protecting individuals, especially minors, from harm by a person who distributes deepfakes and other harmful synthetic content with actual knowledge of the nature of that material; and
(d) taking actions that prevent or abate common law nuisances created by physical datacenter infrastructure.
As outlined in our recent letter to Yellowstone County, narrow zoning and nuisance enforcement to protect neighbors from local data center impacts in a small defined area of concern is consistent with the Right to Compute Act as we drafted it. A blanket county-wide
restriction would not be:
“Yellowstone County can address real neighbor impacts from data centers that are in your wheelhouse — noise, lighting, vibration, setbacks, compatibility with surrounding uses — through ordinary land use planning tools like zoning and nuisance enforcement, in a defined area”
Yellowstone County’s staff legal analysis of the Right to Compute Act (Analysis of Data Center Moratorium, Aug 31) confirms the Act already leaves such tools standing:
[The Act] ‘frames the permissible interest as abating a specific nuisance through the least restrictive means, and narrower tools plainly exist (noise or water performance standards, setbacks, conditional-use conditions). A ban that forecloses the use entirely, rather than regulating its impacts, is difficult to defend as ‘narrowly tailored’ to nuisance’… ‘The narrower and more evidence-based the measure, the better its chances; a blanket ban is the version most likely to be struck.’
For example, Yellowstone County could establish a zone in a defined area and set a generally applicable decibel noise limit that applies next to homes and farms for all industrial uses in that area, including data centers. This type of restriction would likely be consistent with the Act’s intent to focus local regulation on narrowly addressing real harms to neighbors.
Local governments maintain numerous tools like this for addressing local impacts from data centers. The Right to Compute Act leaves those local tools intact while drawing a clear line against onerous government overreach untethered from specific, measurable harms.
We urge you to reject suggestions to exempt local government regulation from the Right to Compute Act. If the Legislature wants to confirm how local governments may address local impacts from data centers, a more constructive path would be to suggest additions to the Act’s list of compelling interests. One option is a compelling interest in applying generally applicable performance standards to protect neighboring property from unreasonable physical off-site impacts such as noise, light, and vibration. That would confirm ordinary industrial standards in a defined district. It would not endorse category-wide restrictions or political vetoes. We are willing to collaborate with Yellowstone County on such an approach.
We continue to encourage state and local government leaders to adopt a principled, limited-government approach to addressing the impacts of data centers consistent with Montana’s Right to Compute Act. That approach would avoid handouts and special favors for data centers, respect fundamental property rights, and focus on enforcing the rule of law.
Respectfully,
Kendall Cotton
President & CEO
Frontier Institute
