The AWS Outage and the Failure of Congress

The AWS Outage and the Failure of Congress

How Tech Monopolies Became the New Lords of Infrastructure

Once upon a time, the American republic broke up railroads, phone trusts, and oil empires for fear that too much power in too few hands would strangle the nation’s future. Today, we pretend to live in that same republic while a handful of tech corporations quietly own the modern equivalents of the rails, the telephone lines, and the energy grids. Their names are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. They call themselves platforms, but they are empires, and Congress has done nothing to stop them.

The recent AWS outage was not a “glitch.” It was an omen. Overnight, vast portions of the global internet staggered to a halt because a single corporate server farm hiccupped. Banks, hospitals, logistics chains, and communications networks all blinked out like candles in a storm. What we witnessed was not just technological failure, but political cowardice: the consequence of decades of congressional paralysis in the face of concentrated corporate power.

For years, investigative reports, bipartisan bills, and expert panels all said the same thing: break them up. Structural separation, divestment of subsidiaries, interoperability mandates, and ownership restrictions, every necessary remedy was laid out like a surgeon’s plan before an operation. But Congress, that slumbering colossus, could not lift a scalpel. Instead, it listened to the soothing voice of lobbyists whispering promises of innovation, jobs, and campaign contributions.

And so the infection spread.

Amazon became not merely a marketplace, but the warehouse, the shipping line, and the very cloud that hosts its competitors. Google became not merely a search engine, but the advertising infrastructure, the operating system, and the content arbiter of the digital age. Microsoft entrenched itself in enterprise software and cloud dominance, while Facebook transformed itself into an attention monopoly, harvesting the social lives of billions. Each of these entities owns entire ecosystems that no competitor can enter without permission or without paying tribute.

This is not capitalism. It is feudalism with better branding.

The AWS outage proved that the world’s digital backbone is balanced on the servers of a single private company. This is what happens when competition dies and monopoly becomes infrastructure. In any sane system, redundancy would be built into critical technology. But monopolies do not compete; they consolidate. Their incentive is not resilience, but rent extraction. Why harden the system when failure itself proves dependency?

Congress was warned about this fragility long before. The proposals were clear: bar dominant firms from owning competing businesses, require open standards and interoperability, and enforce structural divestitures. These were not radical ideas; they were common sense in the age of Rockefeller and Carnegie. Yet the modern legislator, dazzled by stock tickers and Silicon Valley donors, could not muster the will to challenge the machine.

Lobbying did its work well. Billions flowed into Washington to ensure that every hearing ended with empty platitudes about “balancing innovation with regulation.” The result? Balance tipped entirely toward monopoly. Even the occasional antitrust lawsuit amounted to theater, a ritualized scolding of the giants while their stock prices climbed.

Meanwhile, the nation’s dependence deepened. When an AWS data center goes dark, airports stall, retailers freeze, and even parts of the defense establishment lose access to digital tools. This is not merely economic vulnerability; it is a national security threat. A nation that outsources its digital arteries to private monopolies has no sovereignty in cyberspace. It is governed, not by elected officials, but by engineers and executives whose loyalty extends only to shareholders.

If the power grid were this fragile, there would be public outrage. But because this grid is invisible, lines of code and server racks instead of steel towers, Congress pretends the problem is “technical.” It is not. It is moral and political.

The solution, too, is political. Break them up. Strip Amazon of AWS. Split Google into search, advertising, and YouTube. Separate Microsoft’s software empire from its cloud monopoly. Force Facebook to divest Instagram and WhatsApp. Mandate open protocols and interoperability so no user, company, or government can be trapped inside a single corporate silo.

These measures will not destroy innovation; they will unleash it. For the first time in decades, smaller firms could compete on merit rather than access. Engineers could build without fear of being crushed or acquired. The digital economy could regain what monopoly has extinguished: resilience, diversity, and genuine progress.

The AWS outage is the sound of the modern Tower of Babel groaning under its own weight. It is the predictable result of mistaking corporate size for national strength, of worshiping efficiency while sacrificing independence. The same Congress that once had the courage to take on Standard Oil now hides behind hearings and hashtags.

History will not be kind to this timidity. Every empire that centralizes power eventually collapses under the very weight of its own convenience. America has been hoisting itself with its own petard, entrusting the pillars of civilization to entities that answer to no one.

The outage should have been impossible. The fact that it wasn’t is proof that monopoly is no longer a risk; it is the system. Unless Congress acts now, forcefully, decisively, unapologetically, the next outage will not merely take down websites. It will take down trust, security, and the illusion that democracy still governs the digital age.

Break them up. Not tomorrow. Not after the next campaign cycle. Now. Before the lights go out for good.