Facebook, Amazon stifle public debate on tax incentives they receive by demanding prior notice before state and local govt. officials respond to FOIA requests
Mya Frazier / Columbia Journalism Review :
Context & Ripple Effects
The prior-notice demands Mya Frazier reports are not an isolated tactic but one layer of a broader secrecy playbook around tech tax incentives. In the same year, [[a:932145|Amazon's HQ2 bidding war kept the terms offered by unelected city officials outside the reach of FOIA entirely]], and BuzzFeed reported that tech companies seeking real estate were asking local officials to sign NDAs that hid economic and environmental risks from the public and even some lawmakers.
What makes this story matter is where it sits in that arc: HQ2 secrecy and NDAs constrain what governments disclose voluntarily, but demanding notice before a FOIA response reaches into the statutory records process itself. Later reporting showed why the stakes are real — Forbes traced how Big Tech uses shell corporations to win massive data-center tax breaks while creating few jobs, and ProPublica's IRS filings revealed Facebook's own internal tax-haven planning.
First-order effects
- State and local officials handling records requests about Facebook's and Amazon's incentive packages must now alert the companies before responding, giving them a window to intervene or shape releases before journalists or residents see the documents.
Second-order effects
- Rival jurisdictions competing for data centers and headquarters face pressure to match these confidentiality terms, since refusing them risks losing bids to cities that accept — the same dynamic that made HQ2 terms unreviewable.
Third-order effects
- If private veto points over public-records responses become standard in economic development deals, FOIA effectively stops covering corporate subsidies, shifting oversight toward litigation and investigative outlets rather than routine disclosure.
The trend: Tech companies are extending deal-level secrecy (NDAs, closed bidding) into the public-records process itself, turning tax-incentive disclosure from a default into something negotiated case by case.