I was under the impression the First Amendment was about the government imposing laws that restricted religion or expression of the citizenry. Can you point to the part that says anything about how businesses (built off of public infrastructure) are to be run?
The only caveat to this is protected class. There are some movements to make political affiliation a protected class, but I personally think that’s the wrong path to go down since it’s not an “inherent” attribute of a person like race, age, sexual orientation, etc.
I don't have an answer to this, because I agree with you.
Maybe if you "arbitrarily" decide to stop doing business with someone, after you've already started, without a breech of any terms of service, you should be financially liable in some way? Contract law should cover that (I'm def no expert). Does it? Like, if Amazon decides to cut me off from hosting, and I haven't broken any laws, rules or ToS, they should have to pay for me to be up-and-running elsewhere. In other words, AWS can't boot someone without establishing wrong-doing.
It feels like this wouldn't require much more than tighter contracts, handing more power to the customer. I'm in favour of that.
Pretty much any large company with appropriate risk controls (not to mention the financial incentives) will negotiate and sign custom long-term deals with AWS’s extremely large sales staff.
https://www.ciodive.com/news/underlying-pinterests-technolog...
Still, we do have some laws compelling speech (tobacco warning labels) and association (restaurants can't refuse to serve Muslims). But there has to be a good justification. Warning labels express facts and prevent harm. Protected classes are all things considered "inherent" to a person (gender, religion, ethnicity). But there's a high bar for these kind of laws. And preventing people from choosing relationships based on politics is clearly against the First Amendment.
>built off of public infrastructure
This describes almost every business.
This isn't about refusing to do business with someone. The issue in my eyes is agreeing to do business with someone and then arbitrarily[1] deciding to not do business with someone, with no recourse to the customer because the provider is a massive conglomerate with unlimited resources.
AWS didn't refuse to do business with Parler, they did business with them for years. Then one day, based on ambiguous and discriminantly applied rules that may or may not apply to Parler's competitors on the same hosting platform, decided to not do business with them. I don't think that's right.
Look at Apple's letter to the Parler CEO regarding being pulled from the App Store: Apple says Parler is responsible for all the content on their site. And yet, Apple doesn't live by the same rules, in fact they actively lobby against them.
[1] Arbitrary because AWS, as far as I've seen, doesn't say "here are the rules you agreed to, here's where you broke them. Goodbye". There's a lot of ambiguity. Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
> Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
From the sound of it, Parler was not responding well to requests for moderation and didn't show signs of improvement. Twitter might be better at it. And, for contracts, it shouldn't matter if one party lets some parties slide but is a stickler for others. The contract was the terms on paper, not "These terms or the most lax behaviors for any parties agreeing to the same terms."
"I want things that I like to be available to me and I want people who deny it to me to be held criminally liable because I don't understand the case law".
I think people are misplacing their anger that big-tech has too much control over our world. This is fine to be upset about, but you can't say "they have too much control, therefor it's illegal for them to do the things they're doing". No, the laws you want haven't been written (or repealed).
There's also a ton of pie-in-the-sky dreaming that if we could just undo the "bad-part" of 230 then magically Twitter would have to host things because reasons which is a gross misunderstanding.
TL;dr- HN commenters tend to skew towards "Engineer" understanding and not "Lawyer" understand, and it's causing them friction with reality lately.