On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 4:31 PM Stephen Satchell <list@satchell.net> wrote:
On 8/9/19 4:03 PM, Matthew Petach wrote:
...apparently Amazon has become a public utility now?
I look forward with bemusement to the PUC tariff filings for AWS pricing. ^_^;;
[...]
And it wouldn't be the PUC, as Amazon is a company national in scope. It would be something like the FCC. Public Utility Commissions are at the local (usually county) or state level.
That was somewhat the point. Public utilities make some amount of sense when there's a local natural monopoly. With a global company, there's no such thing as a local natural monopoly in play; how would you assign oversight to a global entity? Which "public" would be the ones being protected? The city of Seattle, WA, where Amazon is headquartered? The State of Washington? The United States, at a federal level? What about the "public" that uses Amazon in all the other countries of the world? There's no way to make a global entity a regulated public utility; we don't have an organization that has that level of oversight across country boundaries, unless you start thinking about entities that can enforce *treaties* between countries. And I'm not sure I'd want our Ambassadors being the ones at the table deciding how best to regulate Amazon. :/