Did you just make a strong argument for why these services ought to be “nationalized” like public infrastructure?
Yes, that is what I believe. I see a path where after Amazon creates something that becomes a de facto public good they hand it over to a highly competent government agency full of the world's best operational engineers. Those people turn it into a public works project, and it has legendary 25-nines uptime.
Amazon engineers are excited to see their work become part of the fabric of the Galactic Alliance of Good and Kind Beings and no one does oncall like a Quarkian, am I right, 700-hour sleep/wake cycles how cool is that, love working with them.
Do I see a path to get there from here? Uh, not at the moment. We're still working on "hitting each other is bad" so I'm feeling pretty depressed about our outlook.
The zeal to nationalize has gone from."theorerical improvement" to dogma to outright mental sickness. At this point just accept that partnerships where entities specialize in what they are good it can exist already instead of going full paranoid improbable worst case scenario. Amazon would not do well if they tried to occupy a small nation-state. It would be trivial to the US government. (Whether it would be wise for either to do is another question.)
The treatment of "nationalizing being a bad idea" as a threat is a black and white insanity like equating being "unable to be murder someone without consequences" equates to the target automatically becoming the immortal god king eternal tyrant over all.
Amazon is a baby, it's a new-ish company in the grand scheme of things. It's a huge, huge baby, it has accumulated power incredibly quickly. Where is it gonna be in 200 years? Will the federal government still be more powerful?
No one is saying nationalize Amazon tomorrow. But we haven't even managed to give our citizens good internet service yet, we're way behind here, and we do not appear to be catching up.
Perhaps you would argue that "if we never plan for public energy infrastructure we're screaming towards some kind of Gibsonian cyberpunk future where energy is privately controlled".
Do you know any Americans who are completely self-sufficient in food production? Should we plan for public infrastructure there? Or is it ok that our food production is privately controlled?
I personally think it is foolish to move a company's data entirely outside the company and place it wholly at the mercy of a single third party outside your control. But I don't see it as needing some plan to put it into the hands of "public digital infrastructure".
The problem is that we're so busy arguing about whether we should even HAVE a government it's incredibly difficult to do anything smart with ours.
Do you know who own the Hoover dam? Have you ever heard of this thing called National Grid?
Lets adress food production - ever heard of farming subsidies?
Did you never read anything about how these markets function? Because if you do, you will realise that government absolutely does have a hand inevery indutry that's essential to survival of organised civilisation.
AWS isn’t the highway system. It’s the railroad. Now, railroads aren’t all good. Farmers were once relieved that the railroad would buy all of their produce but ultimately grew resentful that the railroad had become the only cost-effective buyer and shipper and could dictate prices to them—this is the etymology of the term “railroaded”. And eventually with the interstate highway system, the railroads had to compete with trucking.
And from that perspective, AWS isn’t even the railroad. It’s a trucking company. The railroad owns the tracks. AWS doesn’t own the tracks; they operate on the same highway that Azure and GCP use. If someone invents something better than AWS, people will invest in migrating to it; that’s how they ended up on AWS in the first place.
Does that mean that the network connectivity should be a public utility? Maybe at the last mile (municipal broadband?) but the backbones seem to work fine as a competitive market, too.
Did you know that the US was one of the only countries where radio was privatized when it was first invented? Most countries nationalized their radio airwaves and had the government control all the broadcasting. We do have the FCC to allocate spectrum but we also had a remarkably free market in broadcasting and, as a result, led the world in radio technology well into the 20th century. Even Britain was so committed to controlling the radio that as late as the 1960’s, the unmet demand for listening to rock music on the radio could only be met by pirate radio stations broadcasting from ships at sea.
Why do you think the U.S. government is one of them? They previously have shown no organizational aptitude for developing software far less complicated than AWS.
I genuinely believe in Amazon and its humans. But at some point in the distant future internet infrastructure will be so ingrained in our lives that it IS our society, and I want to live in a Democracy.
I want our representatives to continue asking powerful companies how they're handling our data, and if they're becoming too big, and all of these things. I see this as a fundamentally good thing.
I don't believe that AWS should be handed to the government, that would kill AWS. I believe that when something becomes critical to the public we should talk about what that means, and how we stay safe.
Amazon holds themselves to an incredibly high bar, and I really applaud them for that. It made me proud to work there when we talked about how critical the work was, and I was awed to see how far we would go to recover from disaster.
But Amazon has this saying about relying on mechanisms and not best intentions, and relying on Amazon's best intentions is foolish as a citizenry; we should continue to question them. And if at some point in the future we realize that AWS is more important than the self-governing society that we live in we should ask whether that is okay.
Tech companies have become some of the most powerful entities in the world in short decades. In generations they could become the world. We shouldn't rely on their best intentions.
Fantasyland. As soon as the profit motive disappears, you’ll have the DMV.
As an example, the “world’s best operational engineers” — what happens when one of those engineers isn’t world’s best anymore? Can you fire him/her? Because in government, it’s extremely hard to fire mediocrity. It’s hard to even fire for incompetence. You’ll have unions getting involved and it will quickly degrade to a public school level of tomfoolery. You’ll have strikes when those world’s best engineers want more money or more holidays. Just look at how good the French train system is — until there is a widespread transit strike, then the country grinds to a halt. I don’t want critical business processes in the hands of a public union that can shut it down whenever they feel offended. With a profit motive, there is a shared incentive to make things better — you provide the service, you continue to get paid. When a government agency employee gets paid regardless of outcome, there is no incentive or fear when a service gets slowed down or interrupted: their job is secure.
Having experienced public sector strikes in France on multiple occasions, there is no way I’d trust the infrastructure of the internet to be benevolently operated by a government entity.
Imagine the politics! Imagine people operating an e-commerce store selling sodas — sorry, but since we have a government mandate to reduce obesity, We are going to cut off your service. You run a porn site? We don’t like that, so we are going to cut off your service. You are running a website critical of our government/union/political party? We are going to slow you down. You don’t have correct diversity of your workforce? We are going to penalize your service.
As soon as you let politicians control something upon which you absolutely depend, you have given those politicians unlimited power. “Vote for us or your servers will go down.” “Agree to our demands or your business is toast.”
It’s scary to give government that power. If AWS goes down, a person will move their business somewhere else. But when the Government system goes down, there is no other options.
Governments can and should regulate, but they absolutely shouldn’t own. And, the regulation they do employ should have the sole purpose of ensuring competition can thrive. Look at how banking regulations have kneecapped the marijuana industry — now imagine that sort of power controlling the entire internet infrastructure.
We need more competition, not a socialized monopoly.
I love that in a comment about fucking space aliens and competent governments the thing that made you call it fantasyland was the latter.
Okay, the French have an incredible train system that goes down sometimes when the union feels the workers are being treated unfairly. That compares poorly to... what? To our total lack of a train system? To our anemic unions and abused workers? I read this and it sounds like a success story for government competence.
Imagine, your company hits $1T. POTUS gets you on stage. They tell you you did SO GOOD. We're really proud of you. We're gonna make you a statue in the Hall of Really Good Capitalists, and we have the best news. You are SO GOOD at this that we're gonna let you do it again. You're poor now, but we're gonna put your name in history books! If you get this rich again on hardcore mode we will make your statue bigger!