In the summer heat of Sault Ste. Marie, a city council chose the slower, more deliberate path — withdrawing a proposed moratorium on data centre development in favour of crafting a regulatory framework by month's end. The eighty protesters gathered outside the civic centre represent a community grappling with a question many municipalities now face: not simply whether to welcome the infrastructure of the digital age, but on whose terms and at what scale. The deferral is not an answer, but it is a choice — one that trades the bluntness of prohibition for the harder work of governance.