Amazon is an online shopping empire. How much power does it wield? Is it a monopoly? Tuesday, February 18th at 9pm on WGVU Public Television, FRONTLINE presents Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos.
WGVU spoke with producer, James Jacoby.
“Everything that is admirable about Amazon is also something that we should fear about it. FRONTLINE investigates, Amazon.”
“Kind of situate yourself back in the mid 90's and Jeff Bezos was working on Wall Street at a hedge fund and was asked by his boss there to look into the worldwide web. The usage of the World Wide Web it's growing at this crazy percent a year, 2300% a year, and he said basically, someone's going to own this. Someone's going to dominate this new space, it might as well be me.”
WGVU asked James Jacoby, in his estimation, how powerful is Amazon?
“I mean it's extraordinarily powerful. Just data alone. We live in a data-driven economy. Data, its cliche at this point to say it, but it's true, that data is really the new oil. You can know a hell of a lot about us from our data from how we navigate the Web to our devices into what we say to our devices and Amazon really has some of the richest data there is. I mean, whether it's what we do. What we shop. What we read. How we read. What we say to our Alexa devices. They have an incredible access to our intimacies. I think we're all recognizing now that that is power."
FRONTLINE presents Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos tonight @ 9pm on WGVU Public Television.