My first thought is "How is it in the interest of Amazon's stockholders to prevent censorship in countries ruled by dictatorial regimes?" and secondly, "How does consenting to being a front for services that are strictly forbidden in certain countries benefit our company?"
Perhaps it's not. AMZN is a for-profit entity. Their shareholders come first. Profit comes first.
The more interesting question is, how does this influence our engagement with Amazon, as members of the tech community and the business community? From hackers to founders to dev leads to CEOs we're all individuals with some degree of influence. Most of us hopefully value the idea of a free society to a great degree, because without one our industry wouldn't exist.
I have no problem with saying that the business I own will think twice about making further investments in AWS because of this. I'm less likely to recommend AWS to our customers because of it.
Businesses which host hate speech get punished by advertisers who don't want to be associated with that kind of drivel. I'd like to see businesses which enable dictators be punished in a similar way.
By the market and this community. I'd like to see more hackers and founders say hey, this company enables dictators so we are re-evaluating/freezing/reducing our investment in their products. (Pick whatever level presents an acceptable cost to you.)
Shareholders still come first if they do the right thing here. Letting reputable people do good with your product rises the tide for the ecosystem. Good for the Internet is good for AWS.
This an abhorrent chain of logic. By this rationale everything should be permissible if it’s profitable and legal in the country it’s done in. Ethics be damned.
Slavery?[1] Fine. Assisting with genocide?[2] Ok. Human trafficking. Sure, as long as we’re making money. Now consider the likes of Facebook or Google. If Iran wanted to purge an ethnic minority from their country and offered a government contract to Facebook to help identify said minority, how is it in the interests of Facebook stockholders to prevent genocide in countries ruled by dictatorial regimes?
Finally, if what you say is correct - that in the current system the wealth of the shareholders is what matters most - I think the broader question becomes: “Why should western democracies continue to permit Laisser-faire capitalism if it refuses to impose any ethical or moral boundaries on itself?”
"How is it the interest of Github stockholders to not censor certain projects when China starts DDoSing the whole site?"
or even
"How is it in the interest of Cloudflare to raise the prices for all of its customers, just to protect a site Russia doesn't like?"
It can't all be about money. Companies that think only about money fail in the long term. If you don't believe that, then I urge you to watch this Simon Sinek video:
