In the article, this isn’t about pollution but sediment from very nearby construction. Yeah, that happens. Kind of why most decent municipal governments plan out stuff so you don’t have people on wells right next to giant buildings. The common exception being gravel quarries, they do regularly disrupt locals wells. This is on them. You should be building data centres in light industrial zones where everyone nearby is on city water.
There are plenty of situations where that’s useful, especially if you can have group chats with images. Think airplanes, weddings, concerts, sports arenas. And if you have meshing and store and forward when nodes are moving around, you can cover a large area that may not have internet. It’s a legitimate tool that no one has done right yet - and as apple only, this is t yet either.
None of them cross the line yet to be “good enough” in practice for all the use cases of an offline messenger. Briar is probably the best, but not useful if even one of your group is on iOS.
No one has got it right yet though. Being apple only, he hasn’t either.
The answer is always neoliberal free market ideology.