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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is making local governments to compete against each others for data center locations, so it's in the public interest to know the locations. For example, you can compare at the location, electricity cost, infrastructure, tax schemes and tax revenue etc. in local level and see how important they are for Amazon and maybe even estimate the benefit of having Amazon.

The location of Amazon data centers is not hidden from it's large competitors, or any adversary.

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Another perhaps less known aspect of these tax giveaways is that the details are kept secret. They are often embarrassingly huge giveaways, that's one of the reasons they aren't public [1]. I wish we could stop corporate giveaways. I love the software work that amazon is pioneering, they are pushing the envelope, doing great work, enabling companies to grow and do new things. But they are one of the richest companies in the world, they shouldn't get tax credits, imho. I don't think this location info should make it risky.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hq2-candidates-keep-p...

I absolutely agree. Essentially, corporations with huge revenue streams get major tax advantages that are not available to local companies in exchange for "creating jobs".

It turns out that each of those jobs is so costly to taxpayers that the only real benefit is for the politicians that announce the "partnerships" (and the receiving company, obviously).

Here's a couple of interesting articles on the matter:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ba...

- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jul/0...

Then shouldn’t they publish the documents showing those giveaways instead which surely makes more sense, doesn’t put AWS customers at potential risk and holds local governments accountable?

The simple thing is to put anything you get your hands on online under the opaque umbrella of public interest. The responsible thing to do is to run with it, find the local governments in those areas and file requests for the records of any transactions to be made public. That would be in public interest. Dumping anything that has a SECRET written on it is not always a good thing.

> AWS customers at potential risk

This line of reasoning is the one that powers at be want us to partake in. It normalizes surveillance in preventing some unknown danger.

Putting AWS data centers on a map is not a danger to customers.

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