Amazon isn't free-riding any more than everyone else. If I can buy hardware and hire SREs to run mongod myself, I should be able to pay AWS to do the same thing

Amazon isn't free-riding any more than everyone else. If I can buy hardware and hire SREs to run mongod myself, I should be able to pay AWS to do the same things for me, and it's weird that the authors expect a cut in one case and not the other.