Netflix Says Use of Amazon AWS is a Competitive Risk

This article is an exaggeration. Due to various laws, regulations, and the fear of being sued by their shareholders, publicly traded companies in the US report every risk factor imaginable in their annual reports. The report in question includes 13 full pages of these.

The relevant section of the 10K is:

We rely upon Amazon Web Services to operate certain aspects of our service and any disruption of or interference with our use of the Amazon Web Services operation would impact our operations and our business would be adversely impacted.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, provides a distributed computing infrastructure platform for business operations, or what is commonly referred to as a cloud computing service. We have architected our software and computer systems so as to utilize data processing, storage capabilities and other services provided by AWS. Currently, we run the majority of our computing at AWS. Given this, along with the fact that we cannot easily switch our AWS operations to another cloud provider, any disruption of or interference with our use of AWS would impact our operations and our business would be adversely impacted. While the retail side of Amazon may compete with us, we do not believe that Amazon will use the AWS operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service.

Other risk factors in the report include everything from boilerplate:

We could be subject to economic, political, regulatory and other risks arising from our international operations.

If we are unable to compete effectively, our business will be adversely affected.

...to the real risks:

Changes in how network operators handle and charge for access to data that travel across their networks could adversely impact our business.

If we are not able to manage our growth, our business could be adversely affected.

I'm surprised that Netflix is still so tightly coupled to AWS, since companies the size of Netflix can actually reap the economies of scale of running their own infrastructure (AWS makes most sense for smaller operations). However, I wouldn't be worried about AMZ sabotaging Netflix's service; it would do massive and irreparable harm to AWS from a competitive and legal standpoint.