The competition benefits consumers. Shopping is much more convenient than before Walmart and Amazon and they help keep prices low— that’s why I wouldn’t be a fan of the government interfering with the two companies.
(Which is literally a thing that has already happened, by the way - the East India Company being the classic example. It was simply called "The Company", had its own flag and military, and completely ruled India.)
One intended effect of Amazon’s PR strategy is to create a sense of momentum about their business. Obviously that is working if people are comparing it to the East India company.
Amazon indeed has a much smaller share than the East India Company had, but I think you may have exaggerated a bit with "at least 2 orders of magnitude". It should have been "at least an order of magnitude".
• 2019 global trade was $19.0 trillion [1]
• 2019 US retail was $4.85 trillion [2].
• Amazon 2019 US retail was $0.22 trillion [3].
• Amazon 2019 global retail was $0.35 trillion [4].
I'm using 2019 because the US retail Amazon data at Statista.com [3] requires an account to view the graph but the visible text on the page includes the 2019 numbers.
That puts half of global trade at 43.2x Amazon US retail (1.6 orders of magnitude) and 27x Amazon total global retail (1.4 orders of magnitude).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264682/worldwide-export-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443495/total-us-retail-s...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104897/usa-amazon-retai...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103390/amazon-retail-ec...
The landscape has changed but small businesses are still selling stuff. There are over 1.9 million small and medium sized business which use the amazon marketplace.
Mom and pop stores are now mom and pop sellers with amazon taking a cut. They make less money but don't have to pay rent for a commercial property.
Amazon is big but its certainly not an unprecedented level of horizontal domination. There's still walmart, ebay, alibaba, shopify...unless you're only looking at book sales.
Vertical integration wise it's trying to go there with its foray into business shipping + whole foods/amazon basics etc but seeing as its not close to dominant in terms of producing goods in any sector that I know of it's not inherently problematic.
Obviously things are different and worse in some respects (and better in others), but comparing it to the East India Company is very over the top at this point.
Keeping prices low is not necessarily so good, and can even be bad, when you consider it from the many other roles you play as a human being in a complex modern society.