Misguided Protests: Canceling your WaPo subscription

I know it feels good, but it is ineffective and will not alter the behavior of the oligarchs. Trump once again corrupts absolutely.

Jeff Bezos chained in a dungeon

I get it. The Post shit the bed, when the 200x Billionaire reached into the guts of the operation and halted the imminent publication of an endorsement for the Harris/Walz ticket.

It was a dick move, and unlike the heyday of mass market media of yore, where the owners were newspapermen, who understood the power that the first amendment adorned on their shoulders, and the phrase “never get into a pissing match with someone who buys ink by the tank carload¹” meant that they were unafraid to go to the mattresses over something they believed in.

No, Jeff Bezos bought the WaPo ostensibly to rescue a declining media icon, using his pocket change. And for many years, he was hands off, letting the editorial board run it as it had always been run. I mean, they were the outlet that led the Watergate revelations.

So, my notes feed is littered with people celebrating their cancelation of their subs to the Post. Hell, even I did it.

But will this really matter to Mr. $203 Billion Dollar Man?

Hardly. It is chump change, and whilst it might make the economics of running the Post a bit shakier, Bezos could write it down to $0, shut the doors, tossing all the staff to the soup line, and it wouldn’t even be noticeable to his bottom line.

A rounding error.

That is what this wave of cancelations is.

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I am also hearing people say they are canceling their Amazon accounts.

That will have a marginally more meaningful impact, but the truth is that Amazon (and their partners in crime Walmart) have hollowed out the merchants that used to populate main streets, the brick and mortar stores that we all say we love, but that convenience of two day shipping, and the Amazon Prime streaming is just much more difficult to kick the habit of.

But even if a LOT of people did that (and I doubt that they would in the long term. One example: If you are a kindle reader, canceling your Amazon account makes all your books you’ve bought go “poof”.

Oops.

But the real mover here is AWS, or Amazon Web Services. That is the original “Cloud” infrastructure. It is huge, it drives a fuck-ton of revenue and profit for Amazon, and it is far more core to your experience on the internet than you probably know.

Far more companies than you would expect deliver their web experience using the servers, databases, and data storage that Amazon makes available. For example, Twitter still uses a TON of the S3 storage on AWS for the images and videos that users share.

Just about every service out there has some dependency on AWS, and that dependency is growing.

But Sweaty, how does this relate to the decision to not endorse?

Glad you asked. During the Trump administration, there was a big push to modernize the computing environment for the government and the US Military. This meant a “secure” and largely dedicated cloud infrastructure. That is a locked down version of AWS.

In the RFQ² process, there were three primary vendors responding, Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure³. From what I read at the time, the AWS proposal was the clear front runner, both on costs and the solution details.

But Trump couldn’t let his loathing for the Washington Post go unanswered and knowing that Jeff Bezos was the financial savior to the Post, and also the prime mover at Amazon, he interfered with the selection process, tilting it to Microsoft.

Naturally, since this was for about $8B in juicy Government contracts, the losers did what they always do, file protests. I believe the protests are still being adjudicated.

So, when people think they are going to “punish” Jeff Bezos by canceling their WaPo subs, or even going the next step and shutting down their Amazon accounts (even abandoning their Kindle titles they bought) they really aren’t even touching the non-existant hair on Bezos’ bald pate.

Nope, this is all about AWS, and a little about being a perennial loser in the Space bidding against SpaceX.

Now, if Bezos was smart, and wanted to try to snack up on some of the space launches, thus accelerating his other hobby, Blue Origin (disclosure, I know someone who works there) he should have done like Mark Cuban and gone all in on defeating the tangerine turd.

But, he didn’t, and he will find out what the high-hard one is when Trump fucks him if he wins. Perhaps Trump will use “National Security” as an excuse to seize Blue Origin and hand it over to Elon Musk.

Never say never.

Bezos ain’t a Charles Foster Kane or William Randolph Hearst. He is that white stuff in chicken shit.

1. Yeah, I am paraphrasing because I am too lazy to look up the actual quote

2. RFQ is Request for Quote, an open call for vendors to respond to the requirements that the buyer then evaluate and make a decision on

3. I am purposely ignoring the Oracle offer, as nobody thought they had the scale and savvy to pull it off. Also fuck Larry Ellison sideways with a chain saw.

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