You might think it’d be more than enough for one man – Jeff Bezos – to simultaneously run the world’s most powerful online retailer, the Washington Post newspaper, and his own pet-project space programme.
Because Jeff Bezos and his Amazon group also oversees a quite extraordinary proportion of everyday traffic on the world wide web. Think household-names like Netflix, Zoom, Disney and the BBC – all of which depend heavily on technical infrastructure directly created and controlled by the world’s richest man himself. And most of us are wholly unaware of how and why that is. So today we’re going to examine how, and to what extent, Jeff Bezos secretly controls the internet.

It all started in 2002. So-called ‘Amazon Web Services’, or AWS, was first created as a department within Amazon, charged by Jeff Bezos with building the leanest, meanest internal tech infrastructure the world had ever seen. Nothing less would do, in order to help Bezos realise his stratospheric ambitions for the company – then best known as a nerdy online book retailer