> The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.
I don't think the idea was that in the event of catastrophe, up to and including nuclear attack, the system would continue working normally, but that it would keep working. And the internet -- as a system -- certainly kept working during this AWS outage. In a degraded state, yes, but it was working, and recovered.
I'm more concerned with the way the early public internet promised a different kind of decentralization -- of economics, power, and ideas -- and how _that_ has become heavily centralized. In which case, AWS, and Amazon, indeed do make a good example. The internet, as a system, is certainly working today, but arguably in a degraded state.
preventing a catastrophe was ARPA's mitigation strategy. the point is where it's heading, not where it is. It's not about AWS per se, or any one company, it's the way it is consolidating. AWS came about by accident - cleverly utilizing spare server capacity from amazon.com.
In it's conception, the internet (not www), was not envisaged as a economical medium - it's success was a lovely side-effect.