[benologist]

If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.

[sigstoat]

> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices...

it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.

[pm90]

Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them?

I think Americans often ignore the reason behind the EU's deep concerns around privacy and regulation is simply because EU lawmakers have no other power over American corporations. Simply none. The most they can do is excessive financial penalties. They cannot jail Bezos. But what they can do, is impose an absurd financial penalty. Amazon will appeal. It will go to court, and the US State Department will try to help Amazon (an American corporation after all, representing American jobs and American workers) and the penalty will be reduced. The EU public is happy, the EU stuck it to Amazon! But they didn't face any significant consequence for their action, and never will.

If however, this happened in the US, it can get thorny for Amazon. A "lowly" judge in Texas can compel Bezos, the richest man in the world, to appear in court. The implicit threat being that, being in non-compliance would escalate the case until it reached the highest courts, which can compel the Federal Govt. to take action to compel Bezos.

A US judge has that power. No judge in any other country has it. Every other country has no reason to believe Amazon will do as it says. Only some have the power to impose the kind of regulations like GDPR, EU being America's close trading and diplomatic partner.

[nostrebored]

You can. You can supply your own keys if you think a company is insane enough to tank its multi billion dollar platform to steal your product.

[pm90]

I mean sure, for the specific case of storing financial reports in s3, you have a technical solution that works. My point still stands for abhorrent monopoly behavior of some US corps outside of the US.

Amazon did not get where it is by being nice (in fact, this HN post is about that aspect of their behavior). They're rational, they will abide by all laws _where they need to_, including regulations (you can't call in favors all the time). Without regulations, this behavior is incentivized. Even with regulations, there is an ultimate get out of free card if the regulation is non-American.

[sigstoat]

> Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them?

amazon themselves. risking the entire AWS business to figure out that their retailers are selling lots of shower curtains and they could be undercut by $0.05 is idiocy.

> I think Americans...

i stopped reading there, as it couldn't possibly have anything to do with what i was talking about. hope getting it off your chest made you feel better.

[pm90]

> i stopped reading there

Ironically, if you had actually read the post you might have understood that it does.

[benologist]

It's just an analogy, for what they are accused of doing on the retail side of their business.

[ryacko]

Yes, it is absurd, it would be illegal.

They could do the same through widely sold advertising metrics.