The next three dates somebody else set

Week Ahead · Ins7ghts Daily, Sunday 25 October 2026

When I started bringing a PC along to play MP3s, there was a night the machine did not boot. I played that night with the vinyl I had brought with me. Nothing heroic about it. The records were in the car because I had not yet decided to trust the new thing completely.

Three dates in the next two months are already fixed, and none of them were set by the people who have to absorb them.

• Tuesday 3 November, the American midterms. More than 200 AI-made political ads have run in this cycle with over $100 million behind them, 31 states have laws covering them, and nothing has passed Congress or the Federal Election Commission.
• Friday 20 November, Meta's new Commercial Terms. Pushed back from 30 October after publishers and advertisers asked EU and UK regulators to block the clauses that let Meta crawl their sites for AI.
• Monday 23 November, Arc Search loses its AI features, and on 22 December Arc stops working on Mac and Windows altogether.

The underpriced one is 20 November. The midterms will be covered by everybody, and a browser shutting down is sad for a few hundred thousand people. Meta's terms are a contract change that lands on every company keeping a business page there, and the clause in question is about crawling your own website to train on it. A delay from 30 October to 20 November is not a withdrawal, it is three weeks of reading time that most legal teams will spend on something else. If your marketing department accepted the old terms without telling anybody, nobody will tell anybody this time either.