Meet me in St. Louis, Bezos, with Amazon headquarters

A couple of interesting things are happening with the massive companies that rule our online lives. First, the lords of Silicon Valley face political headwinds.

There is tech-company skepticism on the populist right, the anti-corporate left and the good-government center. There is talk of trustbusting and utility-style regulation from Steve Bannon as well as Bernie Sanders. There is a palpable feeling, as Ben Smith of Buzzfeed wrote last week, that the online giants’ “golden age” of political immunity is ending, and that it might be “normal politics, normal regulation” from here on out.

Second, one of these giants — Amazon — is in the market for a second headquarters, where it intends to park some 50,000 employees and an awful lot of tech-industry dollars over the years and decades ahead.

The Amazon hunt has inspired data whizzes to argue about which U.S. metropolis best fits the company’s demanding specifications.

The New York Times’ The Upshot, for instance, used indicators like job growth, an educated labor pool, quality of life and ease of transportation to winnow the list to Portland, Oregon; Denver; Boston; and D.C. — and then gave the edge to Denver for its space and lower cost of living.

The company will probably ultimately make a choice along these lines. But the political backdrop, the growing suspicion on the right and left about whether big tech serves the common good, raises an interesting question:

What if Amazon treated their headquartering decision as an act of corporate citizenship, part public relations stunt and part genuinely patriotic gesture?

Instead of picking an obvious BosWash hub or creative-class boomtown, it could opt to plant itself in a medium-sized city in a conservative state — think Nashville or Indianapolis or Birmingham.

Or it could look for a struggling East Coast alternative — Hartford, Connecticut, Baltimore, Bridgeport, Connecticut. Or it could pick a declining city and offer its presence as an engine of revitalization, building Amazon Cleveland or Amazon Detroit.

A particularly compelling pick might be

St. Louis — a once-great metropolis fallen on hard times, the major urban center for a large spread of Trump country, the geographic center of the country and the historic bridge between East and West.

Of course, Amazon also needs its choice for a new headquarters to make financial sense.

If Donald Trump were the deal making, industrial-policy president that he once promised to be, he would be on the phone with Jeff Bezos right now, making a case along these very lines — while hinting, broadly and of course nonthreateningly (har, har), at the political benefits of opening Amazon St. Louis or Amazon Detroit, of being seen as a company that renews cities and doesn’t just put brick and mortar out of business.

I don’t have a strong view — yet — on whether we should treat internet giants like utilities.

But when you enjoy a monopoly’s powers, one way to avoid being regulated like one is to act with a kind of pre-emptive patriotism, and behave as if what’s good for America is good for Amazon as well.