“Perhaps the furor over Amazon’s regional offices will blow over. But it’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline.” Casey Newton on the fallout from Amazon’s HQ2 announcement.

+ Robert Reich: What Amazon HQ2 tells us about America’s great divide. “Tomorrow’s technologies are flocking to hubs of innovation on the east and west coasts, while everyone else is left being left behind.”

+ “One of every two dollars Americans spend online now goes to Amazon. But to think of Amazon as a retailer is to miss the true nature of this company.” Stacy Mitchell on Amazon’s unfair advantage.

+ “They have that engineer’s mindset: ‘We solve one problem and let the chips fall where they may.’ Which is cool when you’re a startup with a hundred guys but when you get a little bigger, not so cool.” Tim Wu, who nailed the timing for his new book, The Curse of Bigness, discusses How Enforcing Competition Law Could Have Stopped Big Tech. (Big tech companies are becoming such monopolies, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Amazon split HQ2 between Boardwalk and Park Place…)