[programminggeek]

Ironically, if they charged more, the odds are there would be scores of articles about how they are making TOO MUCH profit and should give the money away to worthy causes instead of being "greedy" and keeping the money for themselves.

In truth, people will always complain about something when you are successful. This probably means Amazon is doing something right.

[rtpg]

Alternatively people are complaining because Amazon is doing something bad.

Imagine if you're trying to sell lemonade on the street at a reasonable price, and the rich kid down the block sells at 50% the cost of goods. And all that just being funded by their dad.

At one point they're going to be the only lemonade salesperson on the block, and those subsidies are probably going to end. Meanwhile a market was up-ended and everyone who isn't the "winner" ends up losing.

Short term, customers are happy because someone is just giving them free money! But in the end it's not sustainable.

If we think we should let VCs subsidize services, we can just cut out the middlemen and tax their money away instead of playing these kinds of games.

[repsilat]

And what happens when the prices get jacked up? Ideally (perhaps too optimistically) new competitors will arrive on the newly competitive market.

If the loss-leading is unsustainable then it hardly needs to be discouraged, and if it's sustainable it's not really loss-leading. (If it's funded by some other venture with higher margins, like AWS, other players can compete in that market without the albatross of having to maintain the cross-subsidies.)