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So Big Tech, under anti-trust pressure, getting more in bed with the government. The case seems to not only be: "if you break us up, you leave room for foreign

So Big Tech, under anti-trust pressure, getting more in bed with the government. The case seems to not only be: "if you break us up, you leave room for foreign (ie Chinese) competitors, which is bad for national security", but also, "you should spend more money on security, too, so give us more contracts."

jrockway 6y ago
Where is the government going to buy computing resources from if not some sort of large American company? I feel like people would complain no matter the vendor. If they bought a bunch of Intel servers it would be "wow, wasting taxpayer dollars on an antique 14nm process". If they went AMD, it would be "wow, might as well just shut down the IRS and let TSMC collect taxes directly." At the end of the day, the federal government needs servers so people can download 1040 forms or whatever. I don't think it's that bad to pick Amazon, Microsoft, or Google for that. Going deeper, no matter which cloud provider hosts their servers, it's up to the people to elect representatives that put forth the public policy programs they desire. I am sure AWS is just as happy to host some computer program that frees people that have been wrongly convicted of crimes as it is to host a computer program that uses machine learning to round up undesirables.
dehrmann 6y ago
The antitrust case against Amazon is weaker than some of the other tech giants because there's pretty robust competition in both ecommerce and cloud computing (and groceries). The biggest issues I can see with Amazon is some of its practices with marketplace merchants.