I love Amazon. They do so many things well, but not all of them. And some things they do really terribly. I'm going to post two links for discussion, one to The Passive Voice and one to the source of the PV story which it links to.
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/?p=87654
WSAZ Story
At this stage I will simply observe that Amazon not only makes these decisions without any prior notice, which is understandable in certain circumstances, but then fail to give any meaningful information about why the decision was made. In a large number of cases it seems that account holders, or authors and sellers in other cases, are innocent of any wrongdoing, yet suffer not only inconvenience but in the case of sellers or authors real and sometimes substantial economic damage. An apology, even if given, is not sufficient in these situations. And the apology in this case seems to misrepresent events. It seems the account holders involved were simply accused of breaching unspecified terms of service.
Amazon needs to get their act together. They are now so big in the US that cancelling people's accounts can have a very real effect. Anecdotally Prime has been a boon to much of the rural US.
I still love Amazon, and IMHO they do far more good than otherwise. However, I do warn them, for the little it is worth, that they need to get their act together on this type of thing, not only for the sake of their own business but because they have become too big and are attracting too much attention to keep getting away with it. If they don't fix it, I expect that Government will step in and do so. And when they do, they traditionally overreach and fix many other perceived problems at the same time, many of which are often not problems and don't need fixing.