Action Needed to Stop Big Tech Monopoly from Threatening our Economy and Security
Washington, D.C. — On Oct. 24, 2025, a coalition of consumer advocates sent a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the role that consolidation in the cloud services market played in the recent Amazon Web Services outage. The outage, which disrupted thousands of companies and organizations worldwide, is estimated to have potentially resulted in hundreds of billions in losses. The letter, sent to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, was convened by Demand Progress Education Fund and signed by 14 other organizations, including Public Citizen and the American Economic Liberties Project.
The letter demands that the FTC swiftly review, then take bold action in response to how the market dominance and related business practices of leading cloud services providers like AWS leads to systemic fragility, and also examine how dependent key sectors like financial services, telecommunications and government services are on any single cloud provider, as well as any related risks to data security and privacy and consumer protection. Much of the requisite analysis already exists: among others, the FTC itself has previously warned that too much of our nation’s digital infrastructure has become overly dependent on too few companies.
“Given the enormous stakes, the FTC should not defer action until the next crisis — the FTC has the mandate, the requisite knowledge, and the legal authorities to tackle this challenge now,” stated the letter. “Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible.
“The catastrophic, global outage shows us the danger of having everything from beds and smartplugs to major banks and Amazon itself depend on just a few cloud service providers. Big Tech’s relentless drive to monopolize markets is a serious threat to our economy and our security,” said Demand Progress Education Fund Policy Director Emily Peterson-Cassin. “FTC Chairman Ferguson must take action and identify ways to diversify this critical industry and prevent outages like this from happening again.”