Conversation

I 100% support efforts to break away from buying from Amazon but if you fully understand their reach you'll find that it's actually surprisingly difficult to exclude #amazon entirely from an online purchase. The reason you might be putting some portion of the money you spend into Amazon's pocket and not even know it is because of #aws.

In 2024, AWS services were responsible for a monstrous 74% of the company's operating income. Because so many companies make use of AWS services in their technology stack, it becomes increasingly hard to shop online and not have at least some of what you spend go indirectly to Amazon anyway.

I remember a while back I ran a test where I tried just using the internet in general while blocking any services built to run on AWS. It was no longer functional anymore. Forget purchasing, I couldn't even get a functioning browsing experience. I was able to get online with a lot of finagling and setting up a local DNS server, but out of the box my Internet experience was unusable with AWS-backed services disabled entirely.

Even if you only buy locally, if that local business has a web presence, it's entirely possible that Amazon is getting some piece of the action from that purchase. When people say something like "there's no ethical consumption under #capitalism," this is exactly the example that comes to my mind. Technological monopolies make it very hard to keep 100% of your money out of those pockets.

All that being said, you also should never let "perfect" be the enemy of "good." So if you do have the wherewithal to be able to not support morally bankrupt companies monetarily, I'd still call that a worthwhile protest.

I'm not writing all of this to say it's all hopeless, I call all of this out so you fully understand why when you see protests that say things like "avoid *all* spending on this specific day" why you are indeed avoiding *all* online purchases and not just purchases directly from Amazon. By staying offline, you're likely not driving traffic through AWS services and based on their numbers, that's exactly how you hurt them the most effectively.