Infrastructure has no conscience

Some companies are hated for what you see; others for what you only sense. Amazon belongs stubbornly to the second kind. Nobody really hates the van that delivers in twenty-four hours. Unease comes from underneath: the huge, quiet infrastructure that lets one firm sell detergent, books, and compute with the same ease.

Antitrust practices (the US FTC sued Amazon in 2023), warehouses and injury suits, a Prime signup so opaque it cost a $2.5 billion settlement in 2025, tax optimisation that set a school.

The charges differ, yet they share a structure: someone built a conduit through which an indecent share of the world economy flows, and whoever controls that conduit acts as if control carried no responsibility.

Project Nimbus is where that logic stops being a metaphor. In 2021 Amazon and Google signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government for cloud and AI across all state agencies, including security services and military units.

Israel imposed two unusually explicit conditions: Google and Amazon may not limit Israeli use of their products even when that use violates terms applied to everyone else; and they must secretly inform Israeli authorities whenever a foreign court orders disclosure of data on those servers — according to a Guardian / +972 / Local Call investigation (October 2025), via a reporting system masked as payments.

The same firms that publish human-rights reports and AI ethics boards negotiated in writing the surrender of power to enforce those promises when they would have mattered most. For “data sovereignty” Israel required data centres on its territory: if data never cross a legal border, that border becomes a free zone from responsibility.

Since 2022 hundreds of Google and Amazon employees have signed internal letters asking to leave the contract; in 2024 some occupied cloud offices and were fired. In spring 2026 over a thousand workers linked to Google DeepMind in London voted for union recognition including a veto on military contracts.

Power today looks less like a deployed army and more like a service-level agreement, a contract clause, a loading bar. It is easier to be outraged by a rifle than by a server.

We are outraged by such clauses and still order packages from the same company, work for organisations that rest their stack on those servers, hold shares through pension funds we did not personally choose. Perhaps the real unease is not that Amazon is an exception: it is that it is the rule — infrastructural capitalism in which states rent delicate functions to a handful of private firms.

Defenders of these deals raise arguments worth hearing: a contract with a sovereign government; the US itself puts classified workloads on commercial cloud; reaction to Nimbus also tracks the scale of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; if Amazon and Google left, another vendor would fill the gap. How much moral responsibility falls on infrastructure providers versus those who decide how to use it remains a question international law has not settled well.

One simple point remains: we built a world where the click that buys a charger and the click that approves a government contract pass through the same servers, the same companies, the same logic of scale. That may be Amazon’s true unlabelled product: proof that infrastructure is never neutral. With one difference. For the charger there is a return button. For infrastructure, there is not.