More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.
Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere.
Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable".
The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still can't make money.
How do you know Twitch is "buying" AWS servers so cheaply though?
Anyways, infrastructure costs is not as important as market share in the long run, bandwidth and transcoding costs will go down with time. If you build a platform where nobody has grounds to compete with you like Twitter, (Threads tried), you've got something really valuable - maybe not 44 billion worth but still.
Every internal departments budget is charged for their AWS services
The citation below isn’t entirely true, internal departments aren’t charged “retail” prices. But they are charged and if you have multiple accounts opened testing different releases of an open source “AWS Solution” in multiple regions that uses the then $5K a month Kendra service along with largish ElasticSearch, you will show up on the naughty list (ask me how I know)
> When internal game development teams use Isengard accounts, they must pay (via internal accounting) the same rates for AWS compute cycles that outside retail customers pay, according to people close to the teams
Yeah but Twitch is so big it would never pay retail rates to any cloud service, even given the rates for the bulkiest users. And because it's Amazon owned it's not a question of going to AWS but how much they'd negotiate. So on paper Twitch can lose them money but Amazon makes money through AWS.
YouTube is break even and imagine how much content is uploaded and stored there per second, forever. Twitch VODs are deleted after 2 months. Most streamers don't even get any viewers. Those that get viewers get people paying real money on top of ad spam. The numbers don't really add up like how Amazon often pays $0 in tax.
If Office and Azure are operate by two companies owned by Microsoft instead of MS directly then MS the one operating Office would have to pay the one operating Azure for the hosting.
AWS is not a separate company and even if they were, there is nothing stopping one company from negotiating with another company for special negotiated rates.
You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?
no AWS _is_ a different company then Twitch, Amazone owns Twitch but Twitch isn't Amazone.
and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.
It’s “unfair competition” for a company to use its own servers to host its own business?