But knowing how regulation typically works they probably wont help either. They'll probably be over-bearing and quickly out of date, or more likely end up hurting local communities trying to get new business from small-medium scale companies while big mega-corps continue with business-as-usual getting free rewards from the state at the expense of citizens and smaller firms.
this whole episode makes me reflect upon the Tesla Megafactory bidding process where Musk played California off against other states. Ultimately Governor Brown made some comment about how Tesla was just asking for too much and it didn't make sense for California. So it went to Nevada.
And, what I wonder is: is there a consulting firm that serves as an intelligent counter force to Tesla and Amazon et al? Musk and Bezos are supposed to be hyper-smart so is there, say, a branch of Goldman Sachs that can hyper-intelligently advise state/city leaders about this particular kind of divide-and-conquer corporate predation (if that's what it is)?
Oh, there's some karmic payback for the cities doing what they did. You see, all that inside information that the 236 other cities gave away to Bezos? He gets to keep that:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21571/the-hq2-scam-how-amazo...
"Amazon now has a treasure trove of non-public information about America’s future, in addition to knowing how much cash cities are willing to part with to land an Amazon facility. And it got all that, along with a giant PR benefit from the bidding war, for free.
If you knew a city was going to build a road in a particular place, you could make a lot of money buying up the real estate there. Imagine that on a national scale and you can see how Amazon will grow far wealthier from the data it collected than even the raw dollars extracted from HQ2’s big winners. In fact, this was the real reason Amazon orchestrated the whole charade."