Podcast: Regulating social media

The massive outage that crippled Amazon Web Services this past October 20th sent shockwaves through the digital world. Overnight, the invisible backbone of our online lives buckled: Websites went dark, apps froze, transactions stalled, and billions of dollars in productivity and trust evaporated. For a few hours, the modern economy’s nervous system failed. And in that silence, something was revealed — how utterly dependent we have become on a single corporate infrastructure to keep our civilization’s pulse steady.

When Amazon sneezes, the world catches a fever. That is not a mark of efficiency or innovation. It is evidence of recklessness. For years, business leaders have mocked antitrust reformers like FTC Chair Lina Khan, dismissing warnings about the dangers of monopoly concentration as outdated paranoia. But the AWS outage was not a cyberattack or an act of God — it was simply the predictable outcome of a world that has traded resilience for convenience, diversity for cost-cutting, and independence for “efficiency.” Executives who proudly tout their “risk management frameworks” now find themselves helpless before a single vendor’s internal failure.