The chief executive of Amazon’s consumer business will step down next month after more than two decades, the e-commerce giant announced in a blog post Friday and reflected in a regulatory filing.
The Amazon business model and the risks of big data
In recent years, the US company Amazon has been called out over how it treats its workers, its efforts to impede the right to organise, its distribution model’s inherently damaging environmental impact and the devastating effects it has on the local economies where it sets up operations. But there is another issue that has so far been given much less attention: the company’s increasingly dominant position as a data platform and web services provider.
The company founded by Jeff Bezos – the second richest man on earth, according to Bloomberg – is increasingly evolving from being a retail company, into a platform with the same business model as the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Collectively referred to by the acronym GAFAM, the profits of these top-five tech companies have skyrocketed since the pandemic forced millions of people into online social interaction.
It is estimated that the non-retail