Amazon is now so embedded in British culture that an astonishing 90 per cent of us used its online services in one month last year, exceeding that even of the BBC at 82 per cent. Its huge fleet of delivery vans deliver more than one billion products daily to its UK members alone.
The unrivalled convenience of Amazon for meeting our everyday needs is a result of its obsessive customer focus and world-leading technological innovation. Its success is also a consequence of the leadership style and crude political opportunism of its founder, Jeff Bezos, now one of Donald Trump’s “tech bros”, and ranked in the top five of the world’s richest men. Behind Bezos is an army of lobbyists, fighting to get the right rules and regs to make sure Amazon gets even richer.
Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994, was once thought to have liberal values. He spent millions defending the legality of same-sex marriage and campaigned for companies to reach net-zero carbon emissions. But since the last US election, he has rallied to the Maga cause, congratulating Trump on an “extraordinary political comeback” and donating $1bn to the climate sceptic president’s inauguration fund. In another craven gesture to the White House, Amazon spent $75m on a fawning documentary about Melania Trump that was panned by critics.
The idea of Bezos as an investor motivated by anything other than making more money is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Yet Keir Starmer is desperate to have Bezos as his tech bro too. He saw Amazon’s announcement last June of a £40bn investment into the UK as a high point of his time in Downing Street and a “massive vote of confidence in the UK as the best place to do business”.
As one of Amazon’s top three markets globally, the UK should be wary of Bezos’s embrace. Because aside from owning vast troves of our personal data, Amazon dominates the UK’s cloud sector, crucial to the future of AI. In the cloud, Amazon provides critical services to government departments, including the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office.
Amazon has remarkably close ties with Labour ministers. Business Secretary Peter Kyle visited its Seattle headquarters while in opposition and then met Amazon’s UK boss within five days of Labour winning the election. Kyle was “keen to hear from Amazon about any frustrations, opportunities, regulatory and planning challenges” it faced in the UK. Kyle has promised to “champion” and “advocate for” Amazon and the tech sector.
The dominance of the UK cloud market by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which each have 40 per cent shares of the sector, has raised the prospect that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will impose restrictions on the two tech giants to promote greater competition. But Rachel Reeves advocates “tearing down regulatory barriers that hold back growth”.
The Government defends its courting of Big Tech as being in the public interest. Amazon employs 75,000 people in the UK and its investment will create thousands more jobs in new “fulfilment centres” in Hull, Northampton and elsewhere. It is a partner in government AI training schemes and supports the UK creative sector, with Prime Video owning Bray Film Studios in Berkshire.
But Big Tech watchers are concerned. “When companies are this big and dominant they are a threat not just to consumer prices and functioning markets but to democracy because they have so much influence and access to governments,” says Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at Foxglove, a non-profit that monitors the power of the tech giants.
Critics of Bezos’s leadership style point to the recent outrage coming from that bastion of democracy The Washington Post. In 2013, when he bought the paper that covers the White House and broke Watergate, he said: “I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.” The paper, he promised, would not submit to “the private interests of its owners”.
But when the Post prepared to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 US election, Bezos blocked it, saying it would create a “perception of bias”. Many believed he feared that his Blue Origin space programme would lose lucrative public contracts if Trump won.
Bezos, who is worth $216bn (£172bn), promised investment in the Post, once telling a global conference: “You can’t shrink your way to profitability.” But in February, he signed off 300 job cuts that reduced its workforce by 30 per cent and left it looking crippled. A former Post editor, Marty Baron, said he was “sad and disgusted”. The Atlantic magazine reported the cull as “The Murder of the Washington Post”.
Your next read
square SCOTT MILLSScott Mills: My husband and I know we’d be great dads – here’s why we’re childfree
square ANNE MCELVOYTrump set out to humiliate Starmer – but instead handed him a lifeline
square SARAH BAXTERJD Vance is vanishing before our eyes
square ISABEL HARDMAN Who broke Britain?This woman tried to fix childbirth. Instead she accidentally tortured millions
In America, Amazon is now facing some grassroots resistance. Activists descended on the Amazon campus in Seattle last month to protest that the company is providing the cloud infrastructure that supports the controversial deportation policies of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A Wisconsin company has raised $100,000 in two weeks for a “pro-democracy e-commerce platform”, which it dubs an “Amazon for Progressives”.
But Amazon boycotts are not easy when we have become so reliant on the tech giant’s services, both on the doorstep and in the cloud.
The world’s biggest online retailer has made life easier for many but while undermining our dilapidated high streets, paying little or no corporation tax in the UK and acquiring vast amounts of our personal data. Jeff Bezos, inarguably one of the great innovators of the early internet, now seems no better than a rapacious oligarch and – much worse – a danger to democracy.
Hence then, the article about amazon might not just be dominating our lives it could threaten democracy was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Amazon might not just be dominating our lives – it could threaten democracy )
Also on site :