On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 4:31 PM Stephen Satchell <l...@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. :/