But the report’s most notable trend is the large and growing gap between the company’s cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, and everything else it does. AWS reported $5.3 billion in operating income on only $18 billion in revenue. That means that non-AWS businesses lost $1.8 billion during the quarter. And the $119 billion in non-AWS revenue includes presumably high-margin divisions like advertising, suggesting that Amazon’s e-commerce and third-party logistics operations are operating at a multibillion-dollar loss.

The shift to an AWS-dominant business model has been a decadelong process. It is no coincidence that when Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and longtime CEO, stepped down last summer, AWS chief Andy Jassy took over the company. But it raises a problem for Amazon: Under long-established U.S. antitrust laws, Amazon’s bisected business model is potentially anticompetitive and illegal…

Amazon should separate AWS from Amazon.com to create two distinct businesses. If it doesn’t, U.S. regulators should consider forcing the move to protect competitive freedom, the most surefire way to guarantee that the best ideas and the lowest sustainable prices win in the end.