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by benologist 2684 days ago
The article refers to $11 billion in net profit. They haven't known what to do with all their money ever since convincing the tech industry AWS was cheap, this month AWS will net around $700 million in profit.

It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.

The article actually says they received $129 million instead of paying taxes on $11 billion profit!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-2018-aws-delivered-most-of-...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-antitrust/e...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...

1 comments

>It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.

It's "simply their desire" not to pay taxes? You think the IRS accepts that? Do you think they just write in "sry guys, we'd rather not pay"?

No, they aren't paying taxes on this money because it's offsetting prior losses. This is a perfectly reasonable way to structure the tax code, and it only seems like malfeasance to you because you haven't bothered to understand it.

I think they invest massively in accounting and legal and corrupt arrangements to avoid taxes, so it must simply be their desire. Their tax paperwork didn't accidentally end up $129m up instead of $3b down.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/03/eu-to-fine-amazon-millions-i...

It's a while since they didn't make a profit, in large part because of AWS growing to currently north of a million an hour net profit on margins their retail side can't replicate.

https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-ear...

Suggests Q3 2015 was the last time they lost money... and lost can mean anything with enough accounting.