Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2023throwawayy | Hacker News Reader

2023throwawayy

Please no.

I agree disruption in the space would be great, but don't let Amazon enter the ISP space. They have enough money, and power over the internet, as is.

I would have to think that would be an antitrust violation anyway.

View on HN

Seriously...don't give Bezos any ideas. Amazon in the ISP space would be an absolute disaster for consumers.

ISP's are already a disaster for consumers, with their totally deceptive pricing and invented fees.

Any new entrant can only increase competition and drive down prices.

Amazon as an ISP would be amazing for me. There's only one ISP that serves my neighborhood already, so any additional one would be a godsend.

If it's between no new ISP and a new Amazon ISP, I'll take Amazon any day of the week.

Kind of like Google Fi in the mobile service provider space, anyone, even if someone as otherwise bad as Google or Amazon, can potentially disrupt things and improve prices and functionality.

(I work at AWS)

I know this is close to whataboutism so I will try to choose my words carefully, but does Amazon really have that much power over the Internet? Realistically Amazon does not have a large advert network, footing in mobile, operating systems or web browsers?

They have some control in the form of AWS/Route 53 but that's a far cry from some larger DNS, domain registrar and CDN providers.

Not denying that they have a lot of money, but even when using that money to try and buy a user base (Alexa or Fire Tablet/TV) their success has been pretty limited overall.

Without meaning to imply anything, I do suppose that powering much of the western internet does indeed equal having much power over the internet.

I think you overestimate how much of the internet runs on AWS. In terms of websites it’s less than 10%. Their share of the overall cloud is about 35%.

Perhaps, but you'll have to admit those numbers are far from insignificant and on top of that represent things that are rather more impactful than mere personal blogs such as even critical Dutch government services.

When you control the most common way to buy and sell goods personal goods in the western world, you control a lot more than the internet. You control everything else.

There are different forms of power. Pretend you could switch off AWS completely tomorrow. How much of the internet would disappear?

Comparing with Google isn't fair, they are probably the company with the single most power over the internet out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com