Those are good ones but i was thinking of local stuff like grocery (which they tried and are currently failing) and gas (not that i use it). Also, real services like plumbing, electric, vehicle maint. ... Angies list got that corner ;)

The list is extremely long as you say. Amazon isn't good at much except cheap third party stuff made by contract manufacturers in china, books, and AWS.

Most people responded by providing a logical response to my argument while discarding the semantics.

Semantically, what company that (Relies on Amazon to operate) couldn't they destroy on a whim?

That's pretty circular. To the extent any company, A, relies on company B to operate, A can be destroyed by B, according the definition of "rely".

So the logical response wasn't to assume you were being circular. The logical response was to assume you were inferring Amazon is big enough and capable enough to squash any business.

And yet it is obvious in retrospect that I didn't mean entirely independent multi-billion dollar empires, but that is the response everyone went with.

It clearly wasn't obvious to most given the responses.

Maybe not to you

How did Goldman Sachs '[start] out as a retailer, and opened up a bunch of their infrastructure to competitors'? Or am I misunderstanding you?

The 'they' here is Amazon. This is how it should be read: "Amazon started out as a retailer, and opened up a bunch of their infrastructure to competitors. The idea that they'd make it easy for competitors using their infrastructure to beat them makes zero sense.

Bad use of pronouns on my part. As another comment pointed out, I should have written "Amazon".

OK, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks.