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Not sure if it's true, but that's a common complaint with 3rd party sellers on Amazon. Once AMZN spots a winner, they sell direct.

And why wouldn't they? It clearly hasn't stopped sellers. Amazon has them do all the market research on their dime. Amazon then gets all the data to decide what to launch next to improve their margins, and they get paid for the privilege.

I can't say I blame them, but I can't say it does much for my trust in them either.

It seems inevitable, yet would kill the ecosystem. They may need to give a non-compete guarantee, of some kind...

OTOH platform owners (eg MS, apple) have done this (aborbed others' applications as feaures) without apparent harm.

What is to stop them from counting your traffic now, if you use aws that is?

They could, but wouldn't have the advantage of all the handy metadata this service provides to do it accurately, at scale.