Elizabeth Warren by Gage Skidmore
Amazon Web Services recently faced a temporary network-wide outage and related performance issues. The outage impacted numerous businesses, including online gaming networks, trading platforms, and numerous banking services.
AWS has since fixed the bug, stating that services are at “normal operations.”
The swift recovery, however, was not enough for Elizabeth Warren. The good Senator from Massachusetts decided this was the perfect time to talk about breaking up Big Tech.
Sen. Warren continued her crackpot antitrust campaign when she said on X, “If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech.”
What makes Warren’s arguments laughable is that she tweeted this out—on the internet.
The contradiction might not be evident to her, but it is to anyone else that reads the tweet. Companies on the internet use a variety of service providers, as evidenced by other sites, including and especially X, being operational. Breaking up Amazon over a service outage would not only massively disrupt current service provider arrangements but would also lead to lower performance in the market overall. Amazon Web Services has grown to become a global leader in cloud storage and computing services because it is successful, and any antitrust framing of the argument appears to leave out how it grew to become a company trusted by numerous companies, providers, and governments worldwide.
With AWS competing against Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platforms, Salesforce, and Oracle, it is laughable to suggest that there is no robust competition in this space.
The antitrust argument falls apart entirely when considering economies of scale. Amazon, by virtue of being a big company, has the capacity to invest in research and development, place bulk orders for hardware and energy, and other parts of the organization’s analytical expertise allows it to reduce costs for consumers.
Breaking up companies like Amazon will deprive Americans of the fruits of innovation that the market has to offer.