OPINION
Wyoming’s digital future arrived in a Laramie hearing room last month, and the state is not ready for it. In the final week of September, the Legislature’s Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology and Digital Innovation Technology spent hours reviewing bills that are anything but simple. They will decide who controls power, personal data, automated decisions, and the tools used to police the public.
The fight started in August, when the Minerals Committee advanced 27LSO-0023, a proposal to let large users generate electricity “behind the meter” through a separate provider rather than the public utility. After revisions, the bill returned as 27LSO-0181 and consumed five hours in Laramie. The Public Service Commission and the power companies pushed back hard.
Their objection is straightforward: if a data center or industrial site generates its own power, the utility loses a customer and a claim on future grid spending. The public interest runs the other way. Large loads that bring their own generation do not force residential rate increases or force neighbors to pay for upgrades those loads require. Treating a private generator as a regulated utility because it serves one site is regulation in search of a problem.
Two other bills drew the same pattern of institutional resistance. 27LSO-0034 would regulate automated decision systems, including artificial-intelligence tools that can deny medical coverage or other benefits without a human in the loop. When software makes a decision that can cost someone care, someone accountable has to be able to review it.
27LSO-0139 would set rules for automatic license-plate readers, including Flock cameras. Law enforcement correctly notes that the devices help solve crimes. Unregulated retention and sharing of that data also create a record of ordinary people’s movements. Both facts can be true. The bill is an attempt to keep the first without accepting the second.
The largest issue in the room was 27LSO-0140, the Wyoming Personal Data Ownership Act. The bill’s premise is simple: you own your data. The state does not. It would give residents a legal structure and a remedy when that data is misused, whether the collector is a company or a government agency.
That principle matters more than the hearing made clear. For nearly a decade Wyoming has led on digital currency, special-purpose banks, stable tokens, and early data rules. The next step is not another statute copied from the paper world. Computers and automated systems already transact with one another in ways people cannot see or audit. Legal rights have to exist inside that system, or those rights will not exist at all.
Current law mostly governs the physical world. A growing share of finance, identity, contracts, and government filings now happens in a digital layer that has few equivalent protections. Wyoming can write those protections, or struggle to keep up on the global scale.
The Corporations Committee meets in Casper next week on election integrity, business-formation fraud, and a proposed $10 million to $14 million upgrade for the Secretary of State’s office. Half of the committee's legislators that were most inclined to scrutinize that spending and the fraud risk were targeted and defeated in primary elections. The committee should not treat either problem as settled.
Separately, an anti-fraud proposal now before the committee would give Wyoming the first state-level, non-repudiable proof of life for digital signatures on state forms. It would let a person prove identity and authority without exposing the underlying personal data. That is a practical defense against filing fraud, not a surveillance tool.
The Laramie meeting was a tipping point because the ideas are no longer abstract. Power costs, medical decisions, plate-reader data, and ownership of personal information are already in play. Wyoming has a chance to set the rules before the globe sets them. Leading is the right strategy.
David Roland is a member of the Corporation Fraud Prevention Working Group and a member of the Select Committee on Blockchain Digital Identifiers Working Group. With 45 years of computer systems engineering, Roland, now a resident of Cheyenne, is looking to retire in Western Wyoming.