Finally, Amazon sells consumer tools that presumably offer conveniences, but in fact involve considerable compromises in security. These products expose people to privacy violations and other risks that the average customer does not understand.5
LIMITLESS CORPORATE POWER?
Corporations in modern America possess what legal scholars call “corporate personhood.”6 This means they are “legal fictions” that court decisions have defined as the equivalent of flesh-and-blood humans. This is greatly concerning, since corporations do not feel pain, require air, or die—they can outlast all of us and have more financial resources than nearly any other group, such as unions or consumer advocacy organizations, that challenge their power. Amazon embodies corporate personhood more than nearly any corporation in world history. Even its name is prophetic. The Amazon is the world’s largest river—it dominates the ecosystem of an entire continent. In Western parlance, “Amazons” are the larger-than-life figures that physically dominate other “average” humans—in a clear reference to this, Amazon refers to its employees as “Amazonians.” The association of the Amazon corporation with its historical namesakes are not accidental.
Amazon grew to prominence initially as a books-only webstore in 1994 and is widely credited with undercutting real-world bookstore sales. Since the 1990s, B. Dalton’s, Borders, Media Play, and Waldenbooks have all gone bankrupt or out of business. Such bookstores were physical—albeit still market-based—sites of free inquiry and dialogue, where readers could meet with others and discuss literature, ideas, and books. Over two decades later, and with no subtle irony, Amazon has set out to create their own physical bookstores (called Amazon Books) now that some of its biggest competitors—like Borders, which operated thousands of stores—no longer exist. Capitalist investors understand and applaud Amazon’s monopolistic practices. According to Mitchell, Amazon aims to become the marketplace, not simply dominate it.7 In other words, its goal is not simply vertical integration, wherein all aspects of production, distribution, and sale are influenced, if not controlled, by a single economic actor. While Amazon is pursuing vertical integration, it also seeks control over the very fabric of commerce, to become the one-stop-shop for all online trade. Additionally, Amazon has branched into video content creation and streaming with Amazon Studio and Prime Video, and even healthcare products and delivery with PillPack and Basic Care. Amazon owns its own book publishing operation, Amazon Publishing, and delivers e-books through its Kindle e-reader device. Finally, Amazon Pay functions as an online payment and processing subsidiary. European Union antitrust authorities have begun investigating Amazon and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may be beginning to watch Amazon more closely, but the U.S.’s weak antitrust laws have largely facilitated Amazon’s expansion into more numerous markets and economic niches.8 Ironically, the lack of antitrust control on Amazon has fueled the company’s celestial profits, which CEO Bezos has used to invest in his Blue Origin rocket company to position himself as an early settler and colonizer in space.9
Power derives from political sources, too. Consequently, Amazon has nurtured sympathetic allies within the top echelons of American government. The non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics notes that Amazon employed at least 17 major lobbying firms in 2018—spending over $14 million—to influence policies that benefit Amazon.10 Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the major newspaper The Washington Post— which thoroughly covers national news in the American capitol—due to its institutional importance.11 Like many major corporations, Amazon has established a revolving door in politics, notably hiring Barack Obama’s former press secretary Jay Carney in 2015.12 Of the 115 Amazon lobbyists in 2018, 75 percent previously held government jobs.13 Amazon was also a corporate member of the influential conservative policy group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) until social justice advocates, like Color of Change, and unionists pressured Amazon. ALEC is the notorious organization that spawns sample legislation adopted across U.S. states advocating deregulation, voter ID laws, “stand your ground” gun laws, and curtailing union rights.14
The Amazon political action committee (PAC) gave $1.2 million in the 2018 election cycle to federal candidates.15 The company, like much of the Fortune 500, knows how to ride the fence and spread its money around: the top donations went to the Democratic and Republican Congressional committees ($30k each), followed by the two parties’ senatorial committees at $15k a piece.16 From 1998 to the 2020 cycle, Amazon PAC had given $17.7 million.17 While critics argue that these contributions are negligible in size, the money actually goes quite far in electoral campaigns. And, if such donations did not garner favorable results, corporations simply wouldn’t make them. It’s also worth noting that Amazon’s investment in Congress doesn’t stop with campaign donations—the relationship goes the other direction, too. Eighteen Congressional representatives themselves own Amazon shares and thus have a personal stake in Amazon’s financial success.18
Like other large corporations, Amazon aims to avoid paying taxes. While it doubled its profits in one year to $11.16 billion in 2018, it paid zero dollars in federal taxes and even received a $129 million tax rebate from the government, partly due to tax credits and deductions, loopholes that exempted almost half of Amazon’s profits from taxation, as well as a lowering of the corporate tax rate, stemming from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.19 While it did pay local and state taxes, Amazon denied the federal government considerable resources that would likely have been paid by smaller brick-and-mortar stores. From 2008 to 2015, Amazon’s effective federal income tax rate was 10.8 percent.20 In comparison, the average American’s was 13.5 percent,21 illustrating that if Amazon is a “corporate person,” it pays a far smaller portion than its poorer flesh-and-blood brethren. Individually, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth has mushroomed—during the first half of 2018, he accumulated $40 billion, an amount more than the entire yearly pay of Amazon’s estimated 566,000 employee workforce.22
AMAZON WEB SERVICES: HANDMAIDEN TO POWER
Much of Amazon’s profits derive from sources beyond its e-commerce operations, through its other business ventures. It has purchased other technology companies and products, such as Ring and Twitch, which it has adapted to its central business model. But, its most profitable—and power-building—product is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Managing the world’s largest online retail store required incredible computing power and storage capacity. Amazon extended this expertise to become a third-party provider of web-hosting services to other clients, primarily corporate and government. Major corporate clients, which constitute a very small sampling of all AWS clients, include 3M, Airbnb, Bristol-Myers Squibb, British Petroleum, C-SPAN, Canon, Capital One, Carlyle Group, Comcast, Condé Nast, Dow Jones, Gannett, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Kaplan, Kellogg’s, Lexis-Nexis, Lockheed Martin, Lyft, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Netflix, Novartis, Pacific Gas & Electric, Realtor.com, Royal Dutch Shell, Scholastic, Siemens, SoundCloud, Suncorp Bank, Ticketmaster, T-Mobile, and Yelp. AWS also provides financial and banking cloud services for companies and organizations like Aon, Bloomberg, Capital One, FICO, Liberty Mutual, Moody, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Given this extensive list of clients from corporate America, it is unsurprising that AWS controls nearly half, 47.8 percent as of 2019, of the public-cloud infrastructure, worth over $32 billion.23 AWS’s cloud dominance comes from cost efficiency and “incessant rollout of new and evolving services”.24
To illustrate some of the consequences resulting from AWS’s massive cloud infrastructure—and primarily how its ability to accumulate “big data” aids in surveillance and corporate domination—consider the AWS contract with the National Football League. The NFL is a multi-billion dollar “not-for-profit” corporation that enjoys incredible popularity in the United States. The NFL uses AWS to gather terabytes of data each week, including via RFID chips placed in footballs. The partnership normalizes sports fans’ interaction with big data, which has a sinister effect upon privacy. Big data involves an incredible asymmetry of power; it benefits
