Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 115

engage in a broad-based lobbying effort primarily promoting its members'
support for expanding the number of visas for foreign workers (Wallsten,
Yang, and Timberg 2013). However, its activities created turmoil and
an advertising boycott on Facebook itself when the coalition lobbied on
behalf of oil companies and for Republican Party causes in the South
(Edwards 2013). Other companies also boosted their lobbying budgets,
but sometimes, as in the case of Microsoft's effort to rein in Google, they
increased their spending to better position themselves against each other.
Another good example is Samsung, which, as it faced off against Apple in
a set of patent-infringement cases, went from practically no Washington
lobbying presence to spending $800,000 on lobbying the American capital
in 2012, including $480,000 in the fourth quarter alone (Quinn 2013).
Not all lobbying takes place in national capitals, though. Because cloud-
computing data centers require locations that offer cheap land, low utility
rates, and tax breaks, companies that run them spend time lobbying local
oficials, power authorities, and state legislatures for the best possible deal.
For example, Microsoft's decision to build a data center on seventy-ive
acres of bean ields in central Washington required considerable corpo-
rate inesse to convince the state and the local government to provide tax
breaks and utility rates that were less than half the U.S. national average.
The lobbying paid off, at least until the company's use of polluting diesel
generators led to a series of conlicts, a story taken up in Chapter 4. Lob-
bying like Microsoft's in central Washington is seen over and over again
across the United States and around the world. In North Carolina, for
instance, lobbying provided enormous beneits to Apple when the company
proposed to build data centers in the state, partly to take advantage of
low labor costs and low-priced power. To attract the company, the state
legislature approved $46 million in tax breaks, and local governments
cut Apple's real-estate tax bill by 50 percent and its personal-property
taxes by 85 percent (Greenpeace International 2011, 19). 4 Additionally,
North Carolina rewarded Google's efforts with tax breaks, infrastructure
upgrades, and other beneits worth $212 million over thirty years and
Facebook received a similar payoff (Greenpeace International 2011). When
cloud-computing companies in Boise, Idaho, found themselves with a hefty
tax bill levied by a state authority that determined cloud computing to be
the taxable sale of software, they enlisted the local Chamber of Commerce
to help roll back the tax (Glanz 2012a; Moeller 2013).