In theory. But in fact it is the opposite. Companies are accountable to their customers above all else, and the government to its voters. If the IRS makes a mistake with your taxes and Amazon makes a mistake with your order, which of these would scare you more?
I'm talking about accountability to society. I'm only a customer of Amazon in very limited ways (I own a Kindle that I received as a gift, which I buy a book for once every few months, and I spend about $30/month on AWS of which $29/month is a VM I should really decommission), but that doesn't change the ways they impact my life - their influence on the book market, the literally-everything-else market, the cloud computing market, their purchase of Whole Foods, their presence as an employer in my city, etc. None of those worries are a worry about Amazon making a mistake with my order.
So I'm a lot more worried about Amazon than the IRS - I feel the IRS is in fact accountable to me in a way which Amazon isn't.
