Brauer and Etale Homotopy Obstructions to Rational Points on Open Covers

Abstract: In 2010, Poonen gave the first example of failure of the local-global principle that cannot be explained by Skorobogatov's \'etale Brauer-Manin obstruction. Motivated by this example, we show that the Brauer-Manin obstruction detects non-existence of rational points on a sufficiently fine Zariski open cover of any variety over an imaginary quadratic or totally real field. We provide some evidence for why this is expected to happen more generally over any number field, some of which relates to the section conjecture in anabelian geometry. We then prove a result about the behavior of the \'etale Brauer obstruction in fibrations of varieties using the \'etale homotopy obstruction of Harpaz and the second author. We finally use that result and other techniques to further analyze Poonen's example in light of our general results.