We asked around town this week, and what we found was alarming. Most people had no idea what Amazon Web Services even is, let alone what it does. Some thought it was a delivery program. Others guessed it was something to do with Alexa. Almost no one realized that Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS, runs vast portions of the internet, the invisible machinery behind everything from entertainment and banking to education, healthcare, and even the federal government.

That ignorance might seem harmless, but it’s not. This is an educated community where people follow national news, understand policy, and stay plugged into the world around them. If people here don’t know who really controls the backbone of their digital lives, imagine the rest of the country. The fact that we don’t know what AWS is, or that its largest single client is the United States government, should set off alarms.

AWS isn’t a side business. It is Amazon’s core profit engine, generating tens of billions of dollars in quarterly revenue. It operates data centers across the globe and powers the online infrastructure for Netflix, Disney+, Zoom, NASA, and the Department of Defense. Your favorite shows, your work email, even your medical records might live on Amazon’s servers.

And here’s where it becomes even more troubling. Amazon receives massive tax breaks from federal, state, and local governments. It secures some of the largest government contracts in the technology sector. Then it turns around and lays off thousands of workers. You can’t have all three. Pick one, maybe even two, but not all three when you’re operating on taxpayer dollars. You can’t take public money, get preferential tax treatment, and then slash jobs and benefits for the very people whose taxes make it possible. That’s not capitalism. That’s manipulation of the system.

Most people don’t realize it, but the internet isn’t a free, open highway anymore. It’s an elaborate, privately owned system controlled by a handful of corporations: Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. Each plays a separate but connected role. Amazon controls the infrastructure. Meta controls communication. Apple controls access. Microsoft connects the rest. Oracle manages vast amounts of institutional and government data. Together they set the rules for how the world connects, works, and communicates.

The illusion of freedom online is exactly that, an illusion. When one company decides to raise prices, change algorithms, or block certain data, the ripple effects reach every corner of society. These companies aren’t just influencing markets. They’re quietly shaping democracy, culture, and even national security.

We’ve been here before. A century ago, the oil barons built empires so vast that the economy itself revolved around them. They controlled not only the flow of energy but also the flow of politics. It took years of public pressure and government action to break them up and restore competition. The digital world now sits at a similar crossroads. The question isn’t whether Amazon or its peers are successful businesses. It’s whether they’ve become too big, too essential, and too unaccountable to remain private.

The internet is no longer a luxury. It’s the foundation for nearly every aspect of modern life: commerce, education, healthcare, transportation, and civic participation. Try applying for a job, paying a bill, or accessing your bank account without it. The internet has become as essential as electricity or clean water. Yet it remains almost entirely under private control, subject to the profit motives of a few corporations rather than the oversight of the public they serve.

That’s why more experts are calling for the internet to be treated as a public utility. Doing so wouldn’t mean the government takes over every website or server. It would mean ensuring that access is fair, transparent, affordable, and accountable. It would mean broadband is treated as a right, not a privilege based on where you live. It would mean oversight to ensure that no single company can dominate the infrastructure of modern civilization.

Consider how much of daily life depends on these unseen systems. Your medical data might be stored in an Amazon cloud. Your child’s schoolwork might rely on Microsoft systems. Your city’s emergency response networks might run on Oracle databases. When one of these services goes down, as AWS did during a major outage in 2021, millions of people are instantly affected. When governments depend on them too, a technical failure becomes a national vulnerability.

This concentration of control should concern everyone. When powerful companies also enjoy tax breaks and billion-dollar government contracts while cutting workers and consolidating power, it’s not just an economic imbalance. It’s a political one. It raises a fundamental question: who’s really in charge?

At its core, this isn’t just about technology. It’s about democracy. When only a handful of private corporations control the means of communication, commerce, and data, they also control what gets seen, said, and shared. They control whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. They control how we understand the world around us. The American Dream was built on open opportunity, not gated access controlled by a few executives in Seattle or Silicon Valley.

The internet has become the nervous system of modern civilization. We rely on it for everything, yet we’ve surrendered control of it to a small group of profit-driven companies. Maybe it’s time for internet reform, to redefine the web not as a commodity but as a public necessity.

If the last century was about breaking up the oil barons, this one may need to be about confronting the digital barons. The question isn’t whether the internet is powerful. It’s whether we still have the power to shape what it becomes. Next week we will address AI and where we are headed.