Then Amazon used the retail sales information they gathered from these relationships to structure their Marketplace and Fulfilled by Amazon products, breaking the exclusivity clauses in their existing supplier agreements. Amazon lost lawsuits over this.
Kinda hard to call it a conspiracy theory when Amazon is upfront and out loud about their intention to use customer data to enter new markets whenever they see fit.
A thuggish business, I can see doing the above.
But Amazon hacking logs of customer data to get a leg up in some category, no way. That's a different ballgame.
Every retail org would have to immediately leave AWS hands down.
Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.
I love Amazon's cloud services and use them every day. Even so, you can't lose site of the fact they are a formidable competitor.
It's that Amazon competes in many markets, and paying millions and millions to AWS is a benefit to Amazon, period.
Why fund a competitor when you could fund not-competitor?
They may not touch AWS, but the stink from their Amazon related actions definitely affects big companies making decisions AWS.
This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think.
I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.