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Comment by resters | Hacker News Reader

VA was chosen for its proximity to regulators.

Consider that if Microsoft had put an office in the DC area in the mid 1990s we would all be shopping at some e-commerce behemoth owned by Microsoft.

The reality is that for a company like Amazon, regulatory risk is the biggest existential threat to the company's future, and the only way to fight regulatory risk is through extensive lobbying and various legal forms of bribery that involve lots of face time with powerful officials.

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I think you're right. Other commenters are forgetting that there's a lot of soft power in DC.

Yes, employing lobbyists is one way to flex your muscle in DC. But owning a newspaper and employing lots of people in the area is another way.

Imagine you're a mid-level bureaucrat facing a routine decision that could help or hurt Amazon. Now imagine that your spouse works at The Washington Post, your college-aged daughter is an intern at Amazon, and a local non-profit you care about just got a donation from Bezos. You can imagine how that could perhaps sway your decision.

It doesn't hurt that there's a lot of government work being done in the area, especially in defense, at a time Amazon is becoming a major contractor for the US government.

I second that. At my previous job we were looking at AWS and another tool in the FedRamp approved cloud.

From my perspective, Amazon wants a piece of government IT. Which is expensive due to regulations but also lucrative.

The best hedge against regulatory risk wouldn't be jobs in DC, but jobs that turn a light red state purple, or a purple state blue.

Maybe that's partly why Northern Virginia is a leading candidate, but it seems like there might have been even stronger options.

Having a workforce in a low population swing state could have disproportionate impact on national politics. It could elect Dems, or turn against them if they move to break Amazon up.

(I'm not saying this because I know which party would favor Amazon more, but just because polling suggests tech workers are mostly blue, so I think that's the direction you'd start.)

This is if politics were the only consideration, though I'd wager the main considerations are far more mundane, something actuarial.

I think they’ll get that angle through being an employer at the regional scale of Walmart or similar. Of course they’ll employ fewer people than a big box retail outlet, but they’ll aggregate to enough power for senators/representatives to take notice.

Every tech company is already like that in DC/Virginia with the amount of data centers that are kept (and continuously being built) in the state.

>The best hedge against regulatory risk wouldn't be jobs in DC, but jobs that turn a light red state purple, or a purple state blue.

How so? If you turn a state purple or blue you're now at risk of being regulated by the state in addition to federally. Red states are generally hands off when it comes to business.

Imagine green and purple instead of red and blue.

If you give a state to green, with the power to turn it back purple any time green threatens your workers, you have the policy leadership in a bit of a hostage crisis.

Ideology is flexible in big tents, and everyone is a pragmatist with respect to their constituency. Ds in hunting states are more circumspect on guns and Rs near DC go much easier on federal employees.

Amazon also has a lot of government work these days for DoD and intelligence services with AWS. So I imagine that's another motivator for the location. That area of VA will be a great spot to recruit people with the right clearances and backgrounds.

That's right. Tons of contractors want to build into GovCloud as well, which will be exploding in the near future. They already have tons of data centers in Northern Virginia due to its proximity to ISPs and the federal government.

They (data centers) are not in Nova because the government is there, but rather because it has the lowest insurance costs in the Continental US.

Is that the major factor? I'd thought it was more:

* Proximity to low latency backbone connections (originally located there due to government agencies)

* Tax incentives by VA

* Low risk area for disasters

* Cheap power

* Available land

Bezos bought the largest house in Washington D.C. early this year, it was a no brainer at that point that VA was getting it. Breaking it up into two is intersting though, it will probably seem less like HQ 2a and HQ 2b and more like "where does Jeff want to hang out his week?"

Meh. I'm as cynical as anyone, but this is a "just so" hindsight story. You don't need 10s of thousands of engineers near DC to get facetime with powerful officials.

My take on Amazon's political ambition was always that one main goal of HQ2 was to get 2 more US senators on their side. If they now are adding 4 instead, I don't exactly feel disproven :)

Agreed on the regulatory risk. But the biggest defense against that isn't lobbying. It's putting the business's interests in alignment with the governments. Amazon will take a page out of ATT's playback and become the technological arm of the government. THAT is how you avoid being broken up. When the military top brass tells Congress that Amazon can't be broken up because the company is critical to national security.

I mean, if you're talking about AT&T specifically, that didn't work out too well for them in the end.

Which part didn't work out? After the breakup, the pieces of Bell have re-accreted like some kind of Venusian slime mold.

Eh. Facebook and Google both have a lot of lobbyists in DC. You don't need to create a big HQ for that.

The threat is that if DC policy makers split up Amazon, tens of thousands of people in the local area could lose employment.

Isn't DC the only place in the continental US that has no representation in the Senate?

DC proper isn’t that big. It’s only the third most populous jurisdiction in the area. Most of these Amazon employees won’t live there.

Yeah most will live in Virginia, where the offices will be, where the housing is cheaper, and where the public schools are better.

Yes. In fact Congress has direct jurisdiction over D.C.

Or, you know, its proximity to the largest cloud operation it has on US soil? With easy access to light rail, metro rail, and National airport.

You can lobby from pretty much anywhere with a budget and a hotel ballroom rental.

I don't understand the argument that offices being close to data centers or warehouses gives a place an advantage. It does not.

Northern Virginia was chosen for it's proximity to existing data centers (us-east), proximity to a growing AWS government client base, the size of the workforce, and possibly the consideration that they will win and service the DoD JEDI contract. Companies like Amazon rarely lobby directly. They typically use industry groups.

Amazon had a chief lobbyist even when I worked there years ago and they now have the largest in-house lobbyist team in tech: https://www.ft.com/content/56ddca24-3752-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c...

Data centers can be anywhere. They just need cheap energy and high speed data connections.

They certainly don't need to be near the upper management or big engineering teams of HQ2.

You don't need engineering proximity to hire lobbyists. You need engineering proximity to win contracts on the basis of engineering proximity.

True, but winning those contracts is also a very good way to be viewed as too big to fail, too essential for antitrust intervention.

Northern VA benefits hugely from the Military Industrial complex. There is a large pool of engineers working boring-ish jobs in the security establishment that Amazon can easily lure away.

I think this trumps proximity to the federal apparatus.

Can someone explain how having 10-12k workers in NoVA influences regulators more than spending millions on lobbying...which Amazon already does..

If those regulators spouses, friends, family, children, etc all work at Amazon it could make them think twice before making decisions that could hurt Amazon.

An increasing number of decision makers will have family and friends that work there, which is a difficult bias to ignore even when acknowledged.

Microsoft learned the hard way that once you reach a certain size, you must pay Tribute to the Lords, or they'll crush you.

But microsoft was also doing almost everything they could to screw over competitors. It was not that the government made up a bunch of stuff. They made many clever anti-competitive agreements that did things like strongly incentivizing dell to only sell windows and not linux. They tied things together, the worked hard to make internet web pages only display "properly" on windows ie 3. They deserved to get shellacked. They had to change, and I say that as a microsoft employee at the time.

Microsoft made no political donations at the time, and was dismissive of the DoJ.

Political donations should be optional anyway - if you need to "donate" money to not get sued to fuck, there's corruption and mob practices going on.

You're right, that's the way it should be. But reality is different. Remember the video clip of Gates riding around in a golf cart with Clinton, and then the DoJ eased off?

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