... I thought the original premise of Prime was to take goods and services which, under basic economic theory, are more efficient centrally-funded by taxes, and

... I thought the original premise of Prime was to take goods and services which, under basic economic theory, are more efficient centrally-funded by taxes, and provide those via a private entity. Especially things with zero marginal cost, like movies, music, and TV, should not be sold per-unit, but should be available to everyone and funded by taxes. Prime looked like a private equivalent to that. If we all pay $3.5B per month (350M people times $10/month), that's enough to give us all the college textbooks, movies, software, and music we might want to use, as well as paying for a lot of transportation infrastructure for rapid shipping. It seemed like a good model while Amazon was doing that. Now it looks more like what you said. Prime looks a lot more antitrusty in the model it's evolving to. I cancelled Prime about six months back, and Amazon is just obnoxious. There are ads on content I paid for. I can't check out without five annoying alerts. All those Prime deals look a lot less like deals and more like ways to bump up pricing for people who don't opt in. All in all, once I cancelled Amazon, it basically imploded on me, and now I only use it if there are seriously no other options. That also pushes me away from any vendors who standardized on Amazon for logistics. All of a sudden, I realized non-Prime members just won't buy from you if you use Amazon for logistics. It didn't used to be like that. Pre-Prime Amazon worked fine.