I think you are mistaken about Ethereum being classified as a security. This is just a quick Google search for the first result but:
> On Thursday, June 14, 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Director of Corporate Finance, William Hinman (Hinman), announced that the commission would not be treating Ether or Bitcoin as securities. The SEC’s announcement is in line with the recent comments of SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, who recently noted the difference between cryptocurrencies and digital tokens, saying that cryptocurrencies as “replacements for sovereign currencies” were not securities, while digital assets revolving around a venture are often securities.
Not all cryptocurrencies are securities. They don't all fall within the purview of the SEC.
Bitcoin is not is a security. Neither is Etherium. I'm not an expert on this area but I don't believe the SEC has the power to regulate them, unless they stray into naughty territory.
New Initial Coin Offerings are something that it can evaluate and deem a security, requiring proper SEC listing as a security; but the existing established digital currencies are not securities and do not require trading through brokers just like trading cash (or exchanging one currency for another) does not require brokers.
The SEC hasn't declared them currencies but neither are they securities. They are assets that you can trade with anyone. That's my best understanding of the SEC's current stance.
Future ICOs could also being avoid classified as securities if the avoided matching the rules that the SEC uses to evaluate whether an offering is a security. There's a checklist of criteria, including whether the asset is being advertised as something that people can buy and expect to make money on.
Ethereum launched as a network where you could perform functional operations more complex than Bitcoin, and was a bit before the SEC got its evaluation rules together (from what I understand), and so may have slipped under the radar; but it certainly wasn't a pump-and-dump scheme like many other ICOs have been.
Can you clarify what you mean by "pay a fair tax"? I would assume that Amazon (like most publicly traded companies) pays all the taxes that it's required to by law.
> “Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.”
-- Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
The article claims, if I understood it correctly, that GCP will not be profitable unless it reaches the scale of being at least #2. The implication is that economies of scale are necessary for profitability.
For example, in 2014, James Hamilton spoke about how every day that year, AWS was adding enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon's global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (2004). That scale of build-out, server purchasing, etc. presumably justifies and enables significant cost reductions, such as buying equipment from vendors in bulk with steep discounts, or buying or building large facilities at once, etc. AWS is custom designing many parts of its stack including networking chips and software, ARM-based CPUs, and more; that kind of investment is only worthwhile at a certain large scale. This scale presumably motivated AWS's purchase of chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015. Some operator of a few colocation facilities, by comparison, could not justify designing custom silicon since their scale would not allow them to recoup the R&D costs. Before AWS reached whatever scale made these kinds of investments worthwhile, they were purchasing commodity hardware.
To pick another example, a company like SpaceX can only be profitable if it launches a certain minimum number of rockets per year. Without enough rocket launches, and demand from customers, you can't recoup the R&D budget needed to design them.
Google has a head start in cloud because their company's existing facilities are already huge. However, public infrastructure has different demands than internal infrastructure, and it sounds like the necessary investments in public have been costly.
> On Thursday, June 14, 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Director of Corporate Finance, William Hinman (Hinman), announced that the commission would not be treating Ether or Bitcoin as securities. The SEC’s announcement is in line with the recent comments of SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, who recently noted the difference between cryptocurrencies and digital tokens, saying that cryptocurrencies as “replacements for sovereign currencies” were not securities, while digital assets revolving around a venture are often securities.
https://cassels.com/insights/sec-declares-bitcoin-and-ether-....
Maybe you meant to say that it just escaped being classified as a security, but as far as I can tell it's a commodity at present.