Seems like whole premise of Prime, and most Apple products for that matter, is to capitalize on the failure to enforce product tying that's illegal under both Sherman and Clayton.
If we all pay $3.5B per month (350M people times $10/month), that's enough to give us all the college textbooks, movies, software, and music we might want to use, as well as paying for a lot of transportation infrastructure for rapid shipping.
It seemed like a good model while Amazon was doing that.
Now it looks more like what you said.
Prime looks a lot more antitrusty in the model it's evolving to. I cancelled Prime about six months back, and Amazon is just obnoxious. There are ads on content I paid for. I can't check out without five annoying alerts. All those Prime deals look a lot less like deals and more like ways to bump up pricing for people who don't opt in. All in all, once I cancelled Amazon, it basically imploded on me, and now I only use it if there are seriously no other options.
That also pushes me away from any vendors who standardized on Amazon for logistics. All of a sudden, I realized non-Prime members just won't buy from you if you use Amazon for logistics.
It didn't used to be like that. Pre-Prime Amazon worked fine.