[mmcconnell1618]

There is no regulation or legislation that is telling Amazon they can/can't or should/shouldn't post this information. Amazon appears to be responding to the wishes of the President out of fealty or fear. The threat of a negative response by the President is enough to change the behavior of the company.

[hapticmonkey]

Let’s not also forget that Apple and Google are currently illegally distributing the TikTok app in their platforms. Despite a law passed by Congress and upheld by the supreme court that this shouldn’t be happening. But I guess the president, with no legal basis, gets to just order an extension and pinky promise not to enforce it. This is the new crazy dynamic between the administration and tech companies.

https://www.theverge.com/23651507/tiktok-ban-us-news

[7thaccount]

We're going into some kind of crazy corruption. When tariffs change hourly, it becomes impossible for a business to adhere to the law. The only way around that is paying off the people doing the auditing or the people at the top. This isn't good.

[pjc50]

> currently illegally distributing the TikTok app in their platforms

What's the text of the law about this? Was there a free speech lawsuit over it, or is state censorship of the app store fine now? Just asking because in another thread someone is complaining that EU doesn't have free speech compared to the US.

(edit: wow, we're already flagged off the front page, huh)

[hapticmonkey]

The Wikipedia page has a good summary of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Garland

[redserk]

To me, this calls into question to what degree Amazon will willfully comply with government requests that come in via phone call and not a warrant.

From the Amazon shopping side, you can build quite a profile on someone based on their past order history. Want to find protesters? There’s been a number of folks who don’t usually order office supplies suddenly ordering the thick Sharpie markers in a certain area...

Hopefully AWS steers clear of this, I suppose. That’d have even worse implications.

[yalogin]

This is a very good point. This puts AWS in a bad light. We should assume Amazon will, for example, mobilize the whole company to find a needle in a haystack on AWS if the president or his staff calls.

[mr_toad]

> build quite a profile on someone based on their past order history

That’s small potatoes. Think of all the corporate and government data stored in 365 and other cloud services.

[clumsysmurf]

Another request I suddenly worry about is "what books has this person purchased or read on their kindle"

- or -

Who has read books critical of the Trump Regime in the past x months?

[dijit]

Ironically there are protections for this, and much of what we call "Hacker Culture" is built around the ideas; but they only apply to librarians and libraries in the US; https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill

[drivingmenuts]

Many of those protections are meaningless if you ignore the law, as this administration is quite willing to do.

[pjc50]

> to what degree Amazon will willfully comply with government requests that come in via phone call and not a warrant

This has been rumbling on for years, regardless of administration, because the security services love overreach. This is the basis of the whole "EU safe harbor" dispute, because Microsoft can't guarantee to EU customers of their Ireland datacenter that they will follow GDPR and not leak customer secrets to US security services.

[BoredPositron]

Pretty much I consider data on aws as compromised from now on.

[SauciestGNU]

There's a reason the EU is suddenly a lot more eager to migrate away from the US cloud providers.

[koolba]

> Amazon appears to be responding to the wishes of the President out of fealty or fear.

Ah yes. When a company does something at the ask of a Democratic administration it’s an act of valor or bravery. When they do it at the ask of a Republican one, it’s fear or fealty.

In reality it’s neither. It’s always just business.

[PorterBHall]

Before you wave this off as a “both sides are just as bad” issue, consider that the reason Amazon started down the path of displaying tariffs is likely due to a long-standing company value of putting the customer first. It makes sense that, as customers, we would want to see the impact of tariffs on our purchasing decisions. We would also want to see how much the sales tax is and how much the shipping cost is.

The problem for the Administration, however, is that they’ve been telling the American people the tariffs are not a tax on consumers, but rather a tax on foreign countries. This is a lie.

So we have a situation where the administration is intimidating Amazon into going against its own values so that it doesn’t expose the lie the Administration is still telling the American people.

I agree with you that Amazon‘s decision to bend to the administrations demand is just business. There are millions of dollars in military cloud infrastructure contracts that could be rescinded as retribution. And we see that the justice department is used by the president in ways that are far outside the norm.

But do you believe this administration is acting like any we’ve seen in living memory?

[koolba]

> Before you wave this off as a “both sides are just as bad” issue, consider that the reason Amazon started down the path of displaying tariffs is likely due to a long-standing company value of putting the customer first. It makes sense that, as customers, we would want to see the impact of tariffs on our purchasing decisions. We would also want to see how much the sales tax is and how much the shipping cost is.

If they actually cared what consumers think, at some point over the past 35 years they would have added country of origin to product pages. Much simpler and higher impact. Does not require any recalculations or interpretations of local profit margin vs import value. Yet they've explicitly chosen never to add it.

Is that in the interests of the consumer?

> The problem for the Administration, however, is that they’ve been telling the American people the tariffs are not a tax on consumers, but rather a tax on foreign countries. This is a lie.

It is a tax on foreign countries. Some portion of it gets passed on to consumers who chose to purchase imported products. But it's not 100% of the tariff amount. And if there is local competition for the good, it may be 0% of the amount. Unless you're doing direct China to consumer sales (i.e. Temu style), you're not going to be able to come up with a perfect figure for these things either.

> So we have a situation where the administration is intimidating Amazon into going against its own values so that it doesn’t expose the lie the Administration is still telling the American people.

Ha! I agree that we have an administration that is leveraging the bully pulpit quite effectively. I see no change in Amazon's values here. They value money.

> I agree with you that Amazon‘s decision to bend to the administrations demand is just business. There are millions of dollars in military cloud infrastructure contracts that could be rescinded as retribution. And we see that the justice department is used by the president in ways that are far outside the norm.

> But do you believe this administration is acting like any we’ve seen in living memory?

No, I think they're effectively using the tools at their disposal to bring about the change that was promised during the years leading up to the 2024 election. None of this is a shock to anybody that was paying attention. And honestly none of this, at least so far, is particularly out of the norm for what's possible with executive authority. The speed of change is likely a bit much for the faint-hearted, but it's not unexpected either. The man ran on a platform of restructuring trade and 145% tarriffs on China is one piece of that puzzle.

[dleary]

The company said they were going to do something, they got threatened by the current administration, and then the company reversed course.

Please name a single comparable situation in the last 20 years where the Democratic president was the one threatening a company and the company reversed course.