Hitting the Books: Amazon's unique 'threat' to digital commerce
But in her view, and that of many Big Tech critics in her circles, Amazon poses an altogether different threat to business competition. “It’s not just the retail platform, but it’s AWS [Amazon Web Services], it’s the logistics piece, it’s [Alexa] and being the interface for how we interact with the web, and all the devices and everything that are connected to the smart home,” she said.
As the pressure from Washington, DC, increased, Amazon leaders were becoming heated. In one key annual meeting of Bezos’s senior leaders in early 2020, Jassy, the then-CEO of AWS, digested the content of a memo sitting in front of him. It laid out Amazon’s plans for messaging in response to accusations that it was too big or too powerful and engaged in anticompetitive behavior.
“It was very clear from his comments that we shouldn’t let our foot off the gas,” someone in attendance told me years later. In subsequent years, especially in the part of the company that focused on so-called competition issues, “there wasn’t a day that Walmart didn’t come up.” The fact that Walmart, with more annual revenue than Amazon, was not being scrutinized by policy makers drove executives like Jassy crazy.
“How does the press not know this is a front group?” he would lament. As a result, an Amazon communications staffer named Doug Stone spent upward of a year trying to help reporters uncover the group’s funders. Finally, in the fall of 2019, the Wall Street Journal pulled back the veil in an expose titled “A ‘Grass Roots’ Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded by Amazon’s Biggest Rivals.
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