The Real Reason Amazon Dropped WikiLeaks? Taxpayer Money

Earlier this month, online retail giant Amazon.com portrayed its decision to drop the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks from its servers as a brave, moral stand prompted by its tremendous concern for protecting innocent lives.

But New York University journalism professor Dave Winer thinks he's stumbled across the real reason the company moved so quickly to boot WikiLeaks, “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”: Amazon's desire to secure lucrative government contracts that could've been jeopardized had it agreed to host a website whose founder has been labeled a “high-tech terrorist” by the vice president.

“Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services [AWS], entitled 'Amazon Web Services Year in Review,'” Wisner recounts on his blog -- an email that heralded the company's financially lucrative and growing ties to the federal government.

“Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments,” reads the letter from Amazon. “AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE's National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA.”

Like any corporation, Amazon acts in the way it thinks it can best maximize its profit, not how best it thinks it can serve society or, say, public discourse. And its original excuse – that WikiLeaks violated its terms of service because it didn't “own” the content it hosted – never made sense considering the company sells all of Bob Woodward's books, which are loaded with classified information disclosed to him by government insiders, as well as a Kindle version of The New York Times.

However, “It makes perfect sense that the U.S. government is a big customer of Amazon's web services,” writes Winer. “It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.”

The standard comeback for Amazon's defenders is that, as a private company, it is free to host or not host the content of its choosing. And indeed, as stated, that's hard to argue with. But then, Amazon is also a major recipient of taxpayer dollars, making it more of a corporatist creation than a legitimate example of free market virtue. And its customers are also free to give their money to those who share their values – and if free speech and the right to know how the U.S. government is spending its taxpayers' money is one of them, there's better places to shop than Amazon.com.

(H/T Panglossnotes & John Naughton)

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Photo Credit: Daniel Borman