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Forecasters have issued tropical storm warnings for coastal areas of the Carolinas, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Potential Tropical Cyclone Eight, which hasn’t formed but is predicted to soon, is expected to bring impacts within 48 hours from Edisto Beach, South Carolina, to Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina.

Tropical storm-force conditions could start as soon as Sunday night along the coast.

The National Hurricane Center adds, “The combination of a dangerous storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters moving inland from the shoreline.”

The forecast calls for 1 to 3 feet of storm surge at South Santee River, South Carolina, to Oregon Inlet, North Carolina; Neuse and Bay Rivers, North Carolina; and Pamlico and Pungo Rivers, North Carolina.

The unorganized disturbance has maximum sustained winds estimated to be 45 mph and is moving northwest at 7 mph, hurricane center forecasters said in their 8 p.m. ET update. The potential tropical cyclone sits 140 miles east-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina.

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The system is expected to become a tropical storm by Monday, acquiring the name Helene. “On the forecast track, the center of the system should reach the coast within the warning area on Monday,” the National Hurricane Center said.

The disturbance could strengthen in the hours before landfall because of the very warm waters in the Atlantic and relatively low wind shear, according to the hurricane center.

Heavy rain will be a concern going into the work week. “Through Wednesday, Potential Tropical Cyclone Eight will bring 3 to 6 inches of rainfall with isolated totals near 8 inches across northern and northeast portions of South Carolina along with the North Carolina Coastal Plain,” forecasters said.

The forecast calls for 2 to 4 inches of rainfall with isolated totals up to 6 inches stretching north into Virginia. “This rainfall could lead to isolated to scattered flash and urban flooding and minor river flooding,” forecasters warn.

As with all spinning, landfalling tropical systems, a couple of tornadoes are possible and some may touch down across eastern North Carolina on Monday.

The heavy rain will trek north through the work week. “The system will bring the potential for scattered flash and urban flooding and minor river flooding across eastern North Carolina and northeast South Carolina from tonight into early Tuesday. There is also a risk of isolated flash and urban flooding across much of the Mid-Atlantic region through Wednesday,” forecasters said.

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The last few weeks will be remembered as a historic turning point in global efforts to regulate the digital economy. In the past few days alone, we’ve seen the beginning of the third US vs Google antitrust case, as well as an EU ruling against Google and Apple.

Meanwhile, this summer, a federal judge found that Google’s search business held an illegal monopoly, the FTC launched a landmark investigation into digital price discrimination against individuals online, and commerce secretary Gina Raimondo — often considered one of the more business-friendly members of the Biden administration — gave a forceful endorsement of the fight against monopoly power at the Democratic National Convention.

Add to this the French crackdown on Telegram founder Pavel Durov, and Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in a post repudiating online disinformation, following Trump’s repost of AI deepfakes of her endorsing him. All of it has captured global headlines.

The upshot? While it will still take several years to build up the regulatory structures and legislative solutions needed to truly put digital platforms back in service to average citizens, we can declare a certain narrative victory over the arguments put forward since the 1990s by the largest technology platforms in order to entrench their power.

For example, it has now become quite clear that, no, Big Tech isn’t somehow unique among industries and thus deserving of special rules. And, yes, digital commerce and communication should follow the same guidelines as their bricks and mortar peers.

This philosophical shift began with two federal rulings finding Google an illegal monopoly. The third Google case, which began last Monday, will go further, shedding new light on the plumbing of online advertising. This should show the asymmetry of power that exists between Google and content creators and advertisers, as well as how surveillance capitalism as a whole has created the conditions necessary for companies of all types to algorithmically discriminate against their own customers.

Take the first point. Google’s surveillance capacity over publishers and advertisers allows it to potentially undercut advertising rates of various competitors in order to bolster its own advertising business.

But Google’s surveillance goes beyond just advertisers themselves. As a digital middleman, it can collect information about nearly everything we do online — work, play, access government services, talk to our doctors, our families and our banks, book vacations, buy homes, study for degrees.

That information can then be used by advertisers to give us different prices for different products and services. Ever feel like maybe you were being charged more for hotels, for example, because you are a business traveller used to paying full freight on an expense account? You probably are, and, if so, that’s illegal. 

As the FTC put it in a recent statement launching a deep investigation into algorithmic price discrimination, while the transparent use of freely given information to price products and services is normal, “now data collection has become common across devices, from smart cars to robotic vacuums to the phones in our pockets. Many consumers today are not actively aware that their devices constantly gather data about them, and that data can be used to charge them more money for products and services. An age-old practice of targeted pricing is now giving way to a new frontier of surveillance pricing.”

The new investigation chimes with several Department of Justice cases brought by top US antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter, who has brought a record number of cases during his tenure. More important than the breadth is the approach. His department has pulled ahead on issues like algorithmic pricing before private actors were able to build a body of judicial victories in lower courts that would make it hard to do so.

In 2022, Kanter launched what he calls Project Gretzky, named after ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky, because as he puts it, “what made Gretzky great is that he skates not to where the puck is, but to where it’s going.” When you are dealing with large technology platforms that can leverage the network effect to create competitive moats around areas entirely outside their own industries — such as healthcare, groceries, automobiles, or AI — that kind of prescience is crucial. 

It will take years to declare practical victory as fights play out over individual cases in industries from retail to farming, housing to insurance. These battles will dovetail with other policy areas, like the reformation of the global trading system and the adoption of new digital trade rules, or national security issues (digital espionage and chokepoints are a major worry for many governments around the world).

Still, the tipping point is clear. And while Harris has been sympathetic to Silicon Valley, I suspect the regulatory efforts will continue if she wins, in part because of her concern about civil liberties and discrimination. Big Tech’s business model has allowed individuals to be spliced, diced and discriminated against in myriad ways. That’s now starting to change. As we understand through these cases just how problematic the model is, and in how many ways our lives are affected, I suspect that digital rules will finally catch up to reality. 

rana.foroohar@ft.com

In the U.S., more than a third of the food supply goes uneaten. The waste happens at multiple levels in the production and supply chain and is a big contributor to climate change.

Food that ends up decomposing in landfills produces methane — a potent greenhouse gas.

Some states have taken action to try to cut down on this food waste, but a new study finds that state bans on food waste in landfills have had little impact, with one exception.

The research, published in the journal Science on Thursday, looked at the first five states to enact food waste bans: California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts. Between 2014 and 2024, nine states in total banned commercial food suppliers like Whole Foods and Applebee’s from disposing of food waste in landfills.

The laws require them to compost or donate food waste instead. Sending food scraps to compost facilities or specially designed digesters can better capture or reduce methane emissions.

But the new data found that these laws have done little to help.

“We can confidently say the laws didn’t work. They definitely didn’t achieve their intended goals,” said Robert Evan Sanders, an assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego and coauthor of the paper.

On average, the five state laws resulted in a 1.5% decrease in landfill waste between 2014 and 2018, Sanders told NPR. The researchers determined that regulators expected the laws to cut total waste going to landfills by 7-18% based on public documents and regulators’ statements to the press. 

“The laws had no discernible effect on total landfill waste,” said coauthor Ioannis (Yannis) Stamatopoulos, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.

The researchers compared the five states in question to a combination of other similar states that did not implement a food waste ban. By comparing the states, they could predict how much total waste they would have created if the bans had not been implemented. They gathered data on waste from what environmental state agencies reported.

The researchers said they could not measure food waste directly, as that data doesn’t exist. But because organic waste is such a large component of total landfill waste, they reasoned that states would expect to see a measurable reduction in total waste.

According to the study, Massachusetts stood out as the only state to achieve its goal of minimizing how much waste ended up in landfills, reaching a 7% reduction on average over five years, Stamatopoulos said.

The paper’s authors said Massachusetts’ success may be partly due to certain steps the state took to make it easy for individuals and businesses to comply with the law.

Massachusetts had the most extensive network of food waste processing facilities, creating easy alternatives to landfills. Additionally, the law in Massachusetts had the fewest exemptions. “So that makes it easy for people to understand the laws,” Sanders said. The law was also enforced with inspections and fines, said Sanders. In contrast, the researchers wrote, “there is almost no enforcement in other states.”

Sanders notes that some states the study evaluated have improved their waste management programs since 2018, the year the study stopped collecting data. For example, in 2022, California started providing all residents and businesses with organic waste collection services. “They are trying to up enforcement and do the things that we know work,” said Sanders.