Why It's Hard to Escape Amazon's Long Reach

27 Dec 2018 • wired.com

It’s now the largest provider of cloud computing services and a maker of home security systems. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks. The company now occupies roughly as much space worldwide as 38 Pentagons. It has grown so large that Amazon’s many subsidiaries are difficult to track—so we catalogued them all for you. This is our exhaustive map of the Kingdom of Amazon.

I didn’t disagree with the intro, but I laughed at this whole “Kingdom of Amazon” hyperbole a little until I read the article. Yikes. It’s more than a little scary, seriously. Amazon has been slowly growing more concerning in my mind. A year or so ago I switched my Prime membership back to monthly and perhaps this year I’ll cancel it completely. Right now it’s only Kindle Unlimited that keeps me hanging on. I’ve been leaning a lot more on local libraries this past year though, and that might just be the trick that finally helps me break away.