Terrifying power? Amazon has succeeded by getting customers what they want, and doing it cheaper, faster and more conveniently than their competition. Of all the tech companies to be cynical about, they most obviously make people's lives better, and expanding their reach (along with the "ancillary benefits" of giving people access to the internet...) is a moral good.
Really, this knee-jerk paranoia is difficult to understand. If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business. If it tries to break the law it'll go out of business. It has limited power -- effectively none compared to any kind of government -- and no ambitions, incentives or clear paths to acquire that kind of power.
"If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business." This is the central myth of the free market. Part and parcel of a massive internet company is having control over the flow of information, how can people protect their rights if they don't even know they're being violated, or if they're being distracted from protecting themselves by lies and manipulation? That is essentially the stated goal of a company's PR, and the sort of technology that goes into actively manipulative practices that we just accept out of tradition (the entire concept of marketing is a violation of "invisible hand") has now reached the level where people stand no chance, the amount of money and research that goes into making you make decisions that are in a large corporation's interests over your own are something any particular individual could never possibly match.
Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, May, Dayton-Hudson (Target)
Only one of those remains on the list now (in an entirely different form at that).
The Internet has changed nothing fundamental about whether a retailer can be replaced by competition. And no, Amazon's warehouses don't make it impossible to compete with any more than Sears previously having thousands of physical stores supposedly protected them via reach / scale that others couldn't match. For retailers, the Internet is a better catalog. Sears rode the last version to temporary dominance, Amazon rode this version to temporary online dominance.
The myth here, though, is not that companies are taken out by competitors with better technology or more ruthless practices or better PR, that happens all the time. The myth is that when this happens it is always in the customer’s best interests, or that the customer will even be allowed to become aware of what their own best interests really are. For a company there is no difference between genuinely benefitting their customers and manipulating their customers into believing that they have been benefitted. Making that determination falls on the customer themselves, and in the competition between global corporation and median consumer the consumer is wildly out-matched.
This is literally Big Data in practice. If a superhuman level of intelligence is achieved (as in, comprehension beyond that which any individual human could possibly contain) it will be in the field of controlling groups of humans' behavior.
We could already be there. We won't know, because by definition we won't be able to grasp the scope of it.
My own theory is that this is the strong claim to a-life as practiced by collective organisms. To a cell, a human is a bunch of nearby cells, but to the human, the cell could be a potential fingernail clipping. To collective a-life, humans are no longer the point.
Really, this knee-jerk paranoia is difficult to understand. If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business. If it tries to break the law it'll go out of business. It has limited power -- effectively none compared to any kind of government -- and no ambitions, incentives or clear paths to acquire that kind of power.