[lennixm]

1. Jeff Bezos no longer controls Amazon operations. 2. He doesn't own the company either, he owns a minority stake. 3. In what universe does Amazon come even remotely close to having a "quasi-monopoly" over the internet? This isn't true when limiting it to just e-commerce. 4. The majority of people actually prefer to watch ads over increasing prices. Streaming platforms ad-supported plans are MASSIVELY successful.

[NickC25]

1. He's the chair of the board, so he has an outsized amount of control. He could easily fire the CEO or any other C-Suite members if he wanted to.

2. He owns a bit more than a minority stake, he owns (I've found several estimates, so I'm putting in a range here) between 9% and 12.5%. That's hardly a minority stake for a company worth nearly $1.5 trillion. He's the single largest shareholder.

3. Maybe not a full on monopoly, but AWS has the same market share in the cloud space as the next two providers combined. (MSFT + Google). That's as close to a monopoly as I can think in of a competitive industry without getting trust busted.

4. Most people I know would prefer to keep things the way they are - they pay for a premium service on top of already paying for Prime. If Amazon offered Prime Video for free but it was ad-supported, I'd be fine with that. I don't think I'm alone when I say that if I'm paying for a premium service (Video) on top of already paying for a service (Prime), Amazon shouldn't be allowed to triple-dip by selling ads.

Streaming platforms usually have ad-supported tiers, yes, but most of those are either free or very cheap.

[lennixm]

1. I'm not saying he doesn't still have control over governance at Amazon. As executive chair he most certainly does. Operational decision like these are not subject to the board of directors though. He also couldn't "easily" unilaterally fire Jassy. With all the clout he likely still has if he told the board they should vote to fire Jassy over the decision to run ads on PV they would tell him to get bent.

2. You're literally describing a minority stake here.

3. Last data point I saw was around 3% of internet traffic running through AWS. Also I'd say there's quite a large difference between the internet as an entity and the cloud infra a tiny part of it is run on.

4. Most people I know would prefer to get Prime for free but that's never gonna happen either. I'd wager that at this point the only cash flow positive streaming platform out there is Netflix which is simply not sustainable. So it's either cancel the product eventually, raise prices, or introduce ads. The vast majority of people would opt to go with the ads.