Yes, but I would say they're not the most dangerous monopolists. Two of those three tools are professional utilities specifically aimed at developers and designers, who make up a fairly small part of the labor market. Compare that to FB, which controls (at least) the three top communication tools for most of the developed world, has incredibly granular preference and browsing data on pretty much all internet users, and has shown its hand as a completely amoral player. You could argue that FB and Google have about equal power over people when they decide to start acting badly, but personally I think both of them kind of pale in comparison to Amazon.
If Google and FB decided to just completely shut down tomorrow to protest some perceived slight I expect some sites would go offline, surfacing content would be hard, a significant piece of the economy would crash (anything ad-supported, right?), and that's just off the top of my head.
If Amazon were to do the same thing, around 1/3 of all internet users (this is based off a number from 2012 so it's probably massively higher now) would have at least one web request fail. This post puts the percentage of the internet that is "on AWS" somewhere between 3% and 50%, depending on the way your measure it. It's possible that 50% of the internet would experience some form of disruption. That's just the internet though, and it glosses over the fact that the US government runs a bunch of stuff on AWS' GovCloud, along with hospitals and other kinds of organizations important to our day to day lives. So, internet is down, whatever economic effect I mentioned above is like... way worse, but whatever, that's all kind of intangible. What about deliveries? How many people rely on Amazon for groceries, medication (guess who owns PillPack?), cleaning supplies, diapers, etc? Don't forget, Amazon owns Whole Foods now! The list goes on, Amazon is in an insane number of markets, and we just keep giving them more of a share.
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Yes, but I would say they're not the most dangerous monopolists. Two of those three tools are professional utilities specifically aimed at developers and designers, who make up a fairly small part of the labor market. Compare that to FB, which controls (at least) the three top communication tools for most of the developed world, has incredibly granular preference and browsing data on pretty much all internet users, and has shown its hand as a completely amoral player. You could argue that FB and Google have about equal power over people when they decide to start acting badly, but personally I think both of them kind of pale in comparison to Amazon.
If Google and FB decided to just completely shut down tomorrow to protest some perceived slight I expect some sites would go offline, surfacing content would be hard, a significant piece of the economy would crash (anything ad-supported, right?), and that's just off the top of my head.
If Amazon were to do the same thing, around 1/3 of all internet users (this is based off a number from 2012 so it's probably massively higher now) would have at least one web request fail. This post puts the percentage of the internet that is "on AWS" somewhere between 3% and 50%, depending on the way your measure it. It's possible that 50% of the internet would experience some form of disruption. That's just the internet though, and it glosses over the fact that the US government runs a bunch of stuff on AWS' GovCloud, along with hospitals and other kinds of organizations important to our day to day lives. So, internet is down, whatever economic effect I mentioned above is like... way worse, but whatever, that's all kind of intangible. What about deliveries? How many people rely on Amazon for groceries, medication (guess who owns PillPack?), cleaning supplies, diapers, etc? Don't forget, Amazon owns Whole Foods now! The list goes on, Amazon is in an insane number of markets, and we just keep giving them more of a share.