Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere.
Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable".
The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still can't make money.
Twitch is doomed.
Anyways, infrastructure costs is not as important as market share in the long run, bandwidth and transcoding costs will go down with time. If you build a platform where nobody has grounds to compete with you like Twitter, (Threads tried), you've got something really valuable - maybe not 44 billion worth but still.
The citation below isn’t entirely true, internal departments aren’t charged “retail” prices. But they are charged and if you have multiple accounts opened testing different releases of an open source “AWS Solution” in multiple regions that uses the then $5K a month Kendra service along with largish ElasticSearch, you will show up on the naughty list (ask me how I know)
I’m no longer an employee if AWS
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-th...
> When internal game development teams use Isengard accounts, they must pay (via internal accounting) the same rates for AWS compute cycles that outside retail customers pay, according to people close to the teams
YouTube is break even and imagine how much content is uploaded and stored there per second, forever. Twitch VODs are deleted after 2 months. Most streamers don't even get any viewers. Those that get viewers get people paying real money on top of ad spam. The numbers don't really add up like how Amazon often pays $0 in tax.