If that were the case, then of course the answer would be "no" AWS can't just cut off service, just like Verizon can't just drop calls if they think you're discussing political issues Verizon disagrees with over the phone.
I personally don't this AWS is a utility / common carrier (I can go and buy a server and serve a website all on my own for the entire internet to access). Therefore, I don't think the government should require AWS to provide services to clients that they believe are violating their TOS.
AWS has a very clear Acceptable Use policy: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/
This snippet can be found above the fold (not hidden in a long TOS) in their acceptable use policy:
> Illegal, Harmful or Fraudulent Activities. Any activities that are illegal, that violate the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others, our operations or reputation, including disseminating, promoting or facilitating child pornography, offering or disseminating fraudulent goods, services, schemes, or promotions, make-money-fast schemes, ponzi and pyramid schemes, phishing, or pharming.
If nothing else, by AWS hosting Parler they were risking their reputation, which alone is enough to terminate service by the standards set in their AUP.
I think an update is needed: Never anger a man that measures servers by the acre.
How? Where will the server be located? How will it be connected to the internet? ISPs are not common carriers so good luck...
Does renting Linode VMs or Digital Ocean droplets count? Because they can cut Parler off just as easily as Amazon. Do they literally have to buy physical servers and host them on their own property somewhere? But then how do they get connected to the internet without going through some privately owned ISP that might cut them off? How do they register a domain without using a private corporation?
Basically, I'm asking how you can realistically "self host" without going through a private corporation that might decide to cut you off at some level in the stack?
You can’t, and that is the problem with allowing Big Tech to be the arbiter of truth.
Absolutely. As I see it, one of the single biggest problems with the internet has ALWAYS been that users always have had to go through third parties—hosting sites—to gain access to the internet.
Essentially, for the vast majority, the internet does not and cannot provide unfettered access to the internet in the way that a city's Public Commons would have done in years past. The fact is that the technical infrastructure for users to bypass ISPs, social media etc. just does not exist to the extent that would allow millions to do so. As users have no guaranteed [legislated] right to access the internet's Public Commons, they're always going to be at the mercy or discretion of the party who allows them access.
As we've seen in recent days, this is a terrible state of affairs for users, as it clearly demonstrates how the owners of these access points have ultimate control over access to the internet. The fact that the US president has been censored on the whim of a gatekeeper's CEO amply demonstrates the fact. This is an intolerable* situation and ultimately it has to be rectified if we are to have a free and open internet.
Of course, governments love this situation because channeling users through common access points such as ISPs allow them to more effectively monitor and control internet traffic.
_
* Please note, I'm not describing this situation as intolerable because I'm a supporter of President Trump. The fact is that I'm not a Trump supporter but my position is more along the line commonly but wrongfully attributed to Voltaire which is that "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
As far as I'm concerned, President Trump unreservedly has the right to say whatever he wishes to without being censored on a whim by some corporate body (or a bureaucratic gnome therein)—that is unless such comment is outright unlawful (which, in Trump's case, has yet to be determined—and only a court of law can ultimately adjudicate on said matter)!
In my opinion, Trump's behavior has been obnoxious in the extreme but banning what he says is not the answer (especially so given that he's still an elected official—none less than the US President).
Moreover, I believe that no matter how bad, antisocial or outright mad some of these internet cretins are (and I reckon there are many that fit that mold), it is better to know who they are and what they think than to have them and their thoughts go underground—where, in all likelihood, they'll likely fester and become even more dangerous and virulent.
The internet censorship we've seen in recent days is the most prominent example of what the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have been doing for quite some time. That matters have ramped up to censoring the US President may bring the matter to a head and that ultimately we'll see laws enacted that will put limits on these corporate bullies.
(Ultimately, the whole problem boils down to the fact that democracies haven't yet established at law any effective and or reliable methods or protocols to single out what should be censored and what should not—or for that matter, what internet users can actually discuss and or look at online without attracting the attention or ire of government and security services. [It seems to me that only online content that's deemed illegal at law ought to be subject to censorship—nothing else.]
The fact that governments haven't so acted is now proving to be very troubling, and until it's resolved at law the problem with Big Tech will persist.)
That's exactly what companies did not too long ago for this very reason. They wanted full control over the entire stack and yes had physical servers in physical offices.
Over time, folks laid off their IT staff and traded away their control for convenience. That's the tradeoff: their house -> their rules, your house -> your rules.
> But then how do they get connected to the internet without going through some privately owned ISP that might cut them off?
Now that is an insurmountable obstacle and a real problem. For that matter, what if Comcast cut off all of AWS until they banned Parler? It would take years to build a physical cable network. The highways are much more important than the parking lots.
Even if you bought your own physical servers, you still need an agreement with an internet carrier and a colocation facility.
Renting a Linode is a convenient shortcut but you need that one contract with Linode. Linode can, does, and should enforce terms of service.
You can run a website off your home internet connection with a $20 raspberry pi, but your ISP can, does, and should enforce terms of service.
In theory you could become an ISP by entering into a peering agreement with other ISPs. Internet providers do this. Those ISPs will have their own terms, some of them may not regard content but I expect all of them would specifically defer to local law regarding the transported content.
"Bulletproof hosting" is the concept being discussed here. It is literally named that way because armed government agents coming to shut the site down or confiscate servers will be resisted.
Now call me a fanatical sheep, but if one think it's necessary to have that kind of hosting to get their political stories, they might just be seeking out extremely radical sources.
So then you have to setup your own generator, on your own land, to power your own ISP.
Even if you own your own datacenter, you still need peering and a way to accept payment.
For payment systems: also easy... everyone has an account at the Federal Reserve offered free as a public service (but with no overdraught or lending services). Payments are processed via SWIFT/ACH for the banks right now and that service should be opened up to all Americans without a bank or Card Services intermediary.
The progressive left has advocated for things like this for decades. Now it is affecting the right, but it's hard to have sympathy as they have been corporate sycophants for decades.
Sewer used to be a luxury, now it's a utility. Water used to be a luxury, now it's a utility. Natural gas used to be a luxury, now it's a utility. Electricity used to be a luxury, now it's a utility.
It's time for network access to also be a utility.
Then, of course, the domain name company may come after you. But you can also use a direct ip address. I don't think domain names are a basic human right either.
And then the RIR cuts off your AS.
Or your SSL issuer revokes your cert.
They can't win on the conventional Internet, even by playing a shell-game. So these 'deplatformed' services will move to store-and-forward mesh networking using opportunistic connectivity over ad hoc WiFi or Bluetooth or whatever. And that's going to be nearly impossible to monitor and police. How will we know what they're discussing if we don't even know that they're communicating?
The more you tighten your grip...
Really, there was a time when every company that had a website would spin up their own hardware and software...
Apple and Google, fine. That’s distribution. They have a lot of distribution power, but that’s an antitrust question.
AWS pulling the plug is infrastructure being yanked, and that’s more concerning. It takes Parler off the web. That’s closer to silencing than removing an amplifier.
Nobody should be forced to provide services to the likes of Parler. But cutting them off with hours’ notice is excessive.
If the activity is illegal, AWS can cut off service.
You can post ANYTHING YOU WANT that's awful on Reddit or Twitter, then immediately screenshot it before it can be reported / cleaned by mods and scream "They allow hate speeeeech!" like they've done to Parler.
The companies made a choice based on their political views, not based on public safety / ToS violations and THAT is why have centralized duopolies on social media is so dangerous in the USA.
my opinion on these kinds of topics is always the same. do I object that amazon, apple, and google have kicked hateful content off of their own properties? no. do I object that getting blacklisted by a few large tech companies is effectively getting kicked off the entire internet? very much yes.
But there are plenty of other places for Parler to host, register domains, etc. There are at least dozens of hosting companies that can do cloud hosting at the scale they need (which isn't exactly huge despite the hype), there are hundreds more that could be used in tandem to cover their needs. Either Parler's inability to handle these moves is a result of them being incapable or unwilling to take slightly more effort in hosting than launching Amazon or Google server instances with a click, or there's an unprecedented amount of unity in companies against Parler. The Gab is still up, Pirate Bay is still up, 8Chan still finds its way onto the internet.
The internet is still decentralized. It's the super easy hosting part of the internet that is centralized. It's the hosting that's big enough they don't notice or have any questions about what they're hosting. Parler ran out of hosting companies they could quietly hide inside without someone noticing what they're doing, and in order to find hosting again, they'll have to have an actual conversation with a vendor that sees what Parler is doing and is OK with being a part of it.
One other: there is a caveat of “given that the system works the way it does right now,” where there is sort of a wild-west approach to these types of big communities, then yeah Google is the sheriff of Play Store and Apple is the sheriff of App Store and Amazon is the sheriff of AWS and they set their rules about how much trouble they want on their streets. But if the overall system were fundamentally different[1], then I would not be so sure; there might be some sort of “due process” expectations then which do not exist for me now.
[1] As it may well have to become—those cities were effectively governed that way given population sizes of, what, 10,000 or so? If you have 100 million users and 0.01% of your users can code apps, you have easily that many app developers you have to wrangle.
BUT.
Parler should still be available via 3rd party stores if the user so chooses (which isn't possible). Here we have a case of big tech acting against the will of the user "for their own good" which I fundamentally disagree with. I own the device. I should have the right to install anything I want on it, even if the company that makes the device deemed the thing I want bad for me or for society.
Amazon should not be able to kick services off of AWS they don't agree with. That's entering cloudflare/daily stormer territory and is a dangerous precedent. I prefer the "infrastructure" layers of the stack to be net neutral.
I'm pretty sure that Google Play, for example, has banned other apps in the past because of issues with "user-generated content" that was not sufficiently moderated.
If tech firms are enforcing TOS and doing it in an even-handed way, then I'm OK with that. Freedom of speech is important, big companies with lots of power also have lots of responsibility, but I think they should still be able to have TOS.
Whether it's truly even-handed is an important question. Even if a TOS agreement is written objectively, it's possible enforce it selectively. Personally, I don't see any clear sign that it isn't even-handed. Given the timing, it's obviously reactive, but that seems OK to me because there is new information to consider, and the app took on greater importance, so it's natural to look more closely at it (among all the many apps out there).
The problem is, what happens to the next platform, if they don't like something. Our company's board had a meeting today to discuss cloud, and vendor lockin (or translation... holy eff, this could happen to anyone, let's pump the brakes on this cloud stuff). What happens if for some reason an employee, customer, or some other event caused a similar scenario. Twitter has had plenty of content filled with threats of violence in other instances, and much more direct, targeted, and deliberate. They are still running.
I personally don't have an answer, and it didn't matter why the plug was pulled, but what it did was cause a pause, and a rethink on where the control resides. Needless to say, our cloud strategy changed this morning, and I wonder how many other businesses had a similar conversation this morning.
I saw a representative of Parler being interviewed. She said that they rely on users reporting violations. Perhaps that doesn't scale. But it's unreasonable to think that the problem could be addressed, given 24 hours to do so.
If anything, malicious actors on Parler are second-rate amateurs. Whoever thinks organizing an uprising on a public platform that requires two-factor authentication (via ones cellphone) to join is doing the work of the police and prosecutors for them. If the tech giants and government were really so worried about this, Parler has just created for them the greatest honeypot for simpleminded, would-be insurrectionists ever. And they do have the resources to capitalize on it.
Also FCC broadcast standards for obscene material, making it more restrictive than Twitter on at least some topics.
I have real concern that polling like this only succeeds at falsely distorting and amplifying the small[0] differences between people within a community. It draws battle lines and suggests that people ought to take a position now and sort themselves into buckets. It does not ask us to think beyond a straight line from yes to no, black or white, right or wrong. It does not encourage us to remember our innumerable other shared interests and values.
An observer glancing at any of the submissions about Parler’s fate in the last week will clearly see that opinion is divided. Quantifying that division, as this poll does, might satisfy some curiosity for hard numbers, but what is the cost to our sense of belonging to a community to do so? What is the cost to our ability to put our differences aside in pursuit of larger goals?
The question of what to do about the influence of social media and conglomeration of power among big tech companies is clearly a defining one for our age, but I don’t know how we’re going to get closer to a thoughtful answer with polls like these which—intentionally or not—seem to me almost purpose-built to drive ideological wedges between people and nudge them toward taking hard-line positions. In a time where the lack of nuance itself is driving so many negative outcomes, this feels dangerous.
[0] I don’t mean that this is somehow a minor or unimportant issue, but rather that people on HN are more similar, even in disagreement, than two random people on the street.
Suppose you're a single-person startup of an app called "Speak!". Speak! is pretty niche, but one day, a group of the X-People are ostracized on all the popular forums: Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Because Speak! is the only remaining bastion for the X-People all of them flock to Speak!. Let's say the X-People say things that aren't exactly popular among those who are not X-People.
BigCo claims that Speak! is not properly moderated. You say that you're only a single person and a certain level of moderation cannot be expected given N number of employees.
If BigCo bans Speak! on the grounds that Speak! is not sufficiently moderated, would that mean that any small person operation who operates a surprisingly large userbase cannot operate?
I think there should be objective quantitative measures that any company can use that's applied evenly across companies. Should a company with 10,000 moderators be held to the same standard of moderation as an extremely popular forum with only a single moderator? You decide.
Only so much moderation is possible given a certain amount of moderators and company resources. Are these rules inherently biased against smaller companies?
Parler had thousands of offending posts and users and refused to moderate at all after being told to to be in compliance with various ToS.
It's no surprise that Amazon, Apple, Google, Twilio, etc., do not want to be associated with or support violent seditionists.
They explicitly chose to retain the content
Unfair to smaller firms? Maybe, but the phrase 'don't bite off more than you can chew' comes to mind.
The Capitol riots killed 6 people, including two police officers. The crowd was armed to the teeth with guns, pipebombs, and ziptie handcuffs. They constructed a gallows. They coordinated with police sympathizers to gain access to the building, while one GOP congresswoman live-tweeted the known whereabouts of Nancy Pelosi.
They were planning to murder political opposition and violently overthrow a fair democratic election to appoint their leader instead.
If not for the plan devolving into a disorganized mob, and a quick thinking capitol officer who lead rioters away from the chamber where House Reps had been evacuated, rioters may have claimed many more lives.
Kudos for Amazon, Apple, Google, and all other tech companies for deplatforming violent neo-fascists and their enablers.
Reddit has been implicated in murdering an innocent thinking they were the Boston Bomber. Should Reddit be unreservedly banned?
Suicides and murders have been live-streamed on Facebook. Should Facebook be unreservedly banned?
Each of those platforms host countless instances of violence, are platforms on which abuse of all kinds can grow and thrive - should they all be unreservedly banned?
Sure, some of Parler’s users were violent in the protests. A vanishingly small minority of their user base, at that. But to single out Parler and not any of the other platforms is no different than singling out a political viewpoint that you find disagreeable, and for all that you wax poetic about neo-fascism, nothing is more fascist than saying that a viewpoint you don’t like shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
Parler, by contrast, did not moderate calls to violence. It quickly became a safe space for neo-fascists to plan, coordinate, and execute plots against the US government.
Parler was playing a completely different game to Twitter, Reddit, and FB. Parler was deservedly ejected from the stadium.
I can’t be the only one here actually concerned about Big Tech being the ultimate arbiter of truth and information. AWS is effectively public infrastructure at this point and must be treated as such unless you want to careen into a corporate dystopia where the only information you receive is information Big Tech finds acceptable.
Because they ban politically inconvenient viewpoints.
> their platform being associated with a company that has no problem with users coordinating violent and deadly insurrections...
Does Twitter not host the leaders of terroristic regimes? Has Reddit not been implicated in murder of innocents? Does Facebook not routinely have calls to violence?
All major platforms have broken AWS TOS countless times, and much more often than Parler at that. It’s pretty clear that Parler is being singled out here, and that breaking the AWS TOS is a flimsy excuse at best.
Apple & Google I've no issue with, outside the generic issue with Apple being the only app distribution provider for iPhones. But that should (IMO) be handled through regular anti-trust law.
AWS is more an infrastructure service. I don't necessarily think that they should be held to be a utility. But the logical continuation (if Parler build their own datacenter, will ISPs peer with them?) does lead to problems if the answer is "no". ISPs should be Title II common carriers, and peering should be non-discriminatory. Just like i wouldn't support an electric company turning off their power or a gas company turning off their heat, I don't think ISPs should be allowed to discriminate based on content (except in the case of protocol headers explicitly set by the client to allow such discrimination, such as the IPv4 Type Of Service field or the IPv6 Traffic Class field).
So the real question for me is "is AWS big enough to be regulated as a utility/common carrier?" I lean towards "no" at this point, given that there are several alternatives.
Amazon, etc., also have a first-amendment right to free speech. IMHO this includes deciding not to conduct business with another private party. I do not consider this on their part to be "censorship," at least not moreso than any restriction on their decision to do this.
The underlying issue is that services provided by private companies have effectively become essential infrastructure. This causes a host of problems, which have been pointed out by far-sighted individuals, and only now are some of this issues becoming visible to a broader audience. These private companies are structurally not designed to take responsibility for the activities happening on their platform, and in fact some of them are designed around not being responsible. But there's no one else to shift that responsibility onto, and a large area with a vacumm of accountability has caused problems.
Compared to private companies becoming the gatekeepers of public discourse, I have a variety of things I would prefer, including regulation. But I don't know if any of those alternatives are realistic. So, "yes with caveats."
I do hope we push back hard if this ever gets out of hand.
But I think your poll results may be muddied a bit, because of the the side musings about TBL's data decentralization efforts, international telecommunications regulation, and something about "social media licenses" (?!).
Also, the provided answers are vaguely like a familiar 5-level "Likert Scale" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale), but without the standard wording (& logical/symmetrical ordering) of "strongly agree / agree / neutral / disagree / strongly disagree". (EDIT: it appears HN is randomizing the order on each reload? That's sometimes but not always a good idea.)
The most informative polls will have the least complication in wording/answers, & minimal "preamble" that risks priming answerers to think of things in the author's way.
Not sure if that is the current interpretation of "with caveats" means
Completely obliterating these platforms is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes - and this is my caveat - we should be keeping a tight rein on hate speech, on inciting violence, and on death threats. But, and this is key to me, these kinds of things are the minority of discussion occurring, and should be treated as the outliers they are.
For better or worse, these platforms are the public squares of the internet; if people can't speak freely there, they can't speak freely on the internet. Private company or not, they have a monopoly on what speech appears on the internet, and an individual's right to free speech should be regulated accordingly.
The reason for dropping them should be noted with some kind of auditable trail. If they are dropping them because of illegal activity being sanctioned on the service, that should be part of the record, maybe even along with evidence of their unwillingness to address the problem. All of those things point to a client willing to abuse the service, thus justifying Amazon/Apple/Google cutting them off. If however, the auditable trail shows that the service was making attempts to address the issue, that gives them some leeway. All of this is under the false assumption that there is some unforeseen perfectly objective arbiter of disputes like this.
And AWS may not be a monopoly, but we know very well that if Parler moves to another big Cloud provider they will also cut them off. Sure, they can host their own servers. But it's anti-competitive practice, all the modern devops tooling that facilitates the work of engineers is based on knowing that you will use a cloud platform like AWS.
This debate is pretty puerile anyway, anyone with a brain knows that the gradually worsening censorship of Western countries is wrong and that it's becoming more and more totalitarian day by day.
However, just as it happened with WikiLeaks, it just sets an ugly precedent and it shows to which extent all of the internet's content is effectively beholden to just a few entities. If they want you out, there's little you can do about it, no ifs or buts.
The fear that haters will unite and do some damage is understandable. But silencing them completely is the wrong way.
The only right way to fight lies and madmans is spreading the enlightenment. Speaking the truth, making honest deeds, etc. Making a nicer counter-play. This is the way. Shutting your opponent off is a primitive way that will solve nothing.
All seems to be working properly.
I think there is a very real concern that when the time comes, it will be impossible to organize a revolution against a tyrannical government due to reliance on centralized and regulated social media.
Is about capital and demand. If people want to have independent platforms, they will appear.
I think it's bad for the companies that did this, so I don't agree they made the right decision.
But hurting these companies is a good thing, so I'm glad they did it.
"Whose bread I eat, those song I sing."
why would you expect an honest answer to this poll?
[1] Assuming there are no intelligence agencies peaking at the traffic and login it on real time.
That honestly sounds fascistic. Scratch that - it literally is fascistic. Care to explain your viewpoint?
This whole episode reopens a conversation happening during the whole of the XX century, of how a free society defends itself against actors trying to subvert it.
Trump's mass movement got as far as performing a very botched putsch on Congress to try and stop the ratification of election results it denounced.
This was dangerous. The preceding years showed us that the rate at which people radicalized through social media was far greater than anything you could do to stop it, save from mass censorship it turns out and that still remains to be seen.
I think that society owes a great lot to freedom of expression and indeed the social progress that progressives seek wouldn't have happened without it. Trying to consolidate it over the years closing the barn door to what now is occupying their old place as provocative, non-conforming, "immoral" speech is shortsighted and a detriment to society.
But even with mild forms of deplatforming that already have caused much outrage, it came to this, a small abortive revolution playing out in Washington DC. You may disagree with revolutions or these revolutionaries in particular, but if you don't want one happening you must have the means to stop it from getting there, and you have to find a solution to unbridled social media radicalization.
I wouldn't want as a solution having the Great Powers among Tech's moneyed interests being the ones deciding based on profit, political favor, clout or whatever motivation they may ultimately have.
a) Parler is hardly being “kicked off the entire internet.” They are being severely ostracized and being denied service by major online companies. This would happen to me in my city’s various bars if I developed a reputation as a violent drunk - it is not a violation of any fundamental liberties. Regardless, the idea that Parler can’t exist without AWS is ridiculous - what is true is that maybe you shouldn’t use AWS to run a business that makes money hosting Nazi propaganda! In general people should be aware of the risks of offsourcing to the cloud... especially when your business model is odious and immoral.
b) Parler is not some innocent social media service that got overrun with Nazis. While its leadership is secretive, it is heavily financed and owned by major conservative activists, and a great deal of its marketing is towards disaffected far-right Twitter users.
c) Again and again and again: nobody has ever complained about YouTube banning pornography. It is not because we’re moral scolds who want to make porn illegal - it is because pornography is a shady business with shady people and YouTube has every right to not want to get involved with it. It would be a violation of the first amendment to force YouTube to host porn. Likewise it would be unconstitutional to force Twitter to restore access to @realDonaldTrump. The exact same applies to AWS or the Google App store and hosting Nazis on Parler.
This grotesque perversion of “free speech” being used to shield people from the consequences of hate speech is one of the more worrying ideological developments in recent years.
Here's how I read the poll: If I were a datacenter owner, and I leased out a serious portion of my datacenter as a public cloud, would I have terms of service? Yes; I don't want to attract trouble or criminality. Would those terms of service ban abuse, like cryptocurrency miners on free trial accounts? Yes; I can't afford to run a datacenter at a loss for long periods of time. Would those terms of service ban planning or executing crimes? Yes; I can't afford to give service to criminals, as they drive off customers who are less likely to violate other terms of service.
It's that simple. There's no additional caveats. If I saw the sort of evidence that AWS, Apple, and Google have been shown, then I would have cut off Parler as well.
While it's not a caveat, I would certainly enjoy a regulatory approach to moderating the immense power that comes with owning many datacenters. However, given the "free speech" angle, I think that Parler users and owners should suck it up and save up their pennies and dimes for on-premise deployments. If you want to host fascists, then you shouldn't be surprised when the rest of society has an allergic reaction and forces you to go fund yourself.
I could imagine a future where religion makes a massive resurgence and homosexuality is deemed "odious and immoral". So then Grindr and friends should all be able to be kicked off of their cloud hosting and forced to self-host... right?
This false equivalence is bullshit and you are perfectly aware that it’s bullshit.
The real concern here is having Big Tech decide what you’re allowed to believe in. AWS et al should be treated as a public utility not bound by a private TOS, unless you want AWS to control what information you receive and who you can associate with.
How ridiculous. Individuals need water, heat, and electricity to survive in the 21st century. I would argue they also need a cell phone and internet access.
Individuals do not need cloud computing services. For-profit companies want AWS because they can use it to make money. This is not a good basis to form a utility.
Clearly, rights and needs extend beyond the basics of food, water, and shelter. Preventing corporations from dictating what information you’re allowed to access and who you’re allowed to talk to is as essential to a free world as anything else.
For better or worse, these “for profit companies” have become the de facto replacement of the town square, and if we cannot have free speech on these platforms then we cannot have free speech at all, practically speaking.
As an entrepreneur I would refuse to do business with anyone who had a Parler account and I am honestly a bit bothered by this authoritarian suggestion that the state should force me to do business with racists.
If Parler was deemed illegal (eg: it was ruled by law that it's facilitating terrorism), then YES.
If they are violating Amazon Terms of Service / Apple's Terms of Service, then YES (TOS is a bit of a grey area, but assuming that things are clear enough, those should be enforced). One can argue about a monopolic market position, at which case it's the role of the Government to solve the issue and regulate (in a theoretically speaking, well functioning capitalistic framework).
It's a private company. If they were unable to host their own servers, and no ISP would give them an IP address then that is a problem as long as they're following the law.
Maybe if this happened a little more often less companies would go all in on Cloud services.
From the calls to violence on Facebook, to the terrorists on Twitter, to the hardcore pornography on Reddit, plenty of platforms break Apple’s, Google’s, or Amazon’s ToS. I don’t know how one could possibly argue that Parler isn’t being singled out.
Today it’s Parler. Tomorrow it will be whatever ideology the megacorps find inconvenient.
If anything, this whole saga underscores the need for decentralized social media and having control over our own devices and the apps we are allowed to install.
I’m genuinely surprised. HN is the last place that I’d expect to be comfortable with our snowball into a corporate dystopia.
I honestly think this discussion "should they or shouldn't they ban x" is a poor framing of the discussion we should be having. It implies media companies can be unbiased. It implies there is some democracy implicit in social media. It implies that the right virtues can make social media work. I don't think any of those things are true and I don't think we should have a discussion that allows their presumption.
What people are doing on Twitter isn't new. What Twitter is doing isn't new. What people on Parler are doing isn't new. What Parler is doing isn't new. People who believe it is new simply have an incorrect understanding of history. They underestimate the gross bias in media historically. They underestimate the volume and extremity of seditious communication and activity. They underestimate the violence and frequency of political unrest.
If we want to have a real conversation about disassociating power and speech, disassociating money and speech, disassociating status quo and speech, I think that's a worthy conversation. The rest of this is red meat for slacktivist posters.
This isn't about ideology, except in cases where an ideology is calling for violence.
Edit: it turns out Parler actually did have policies and moderation against violent content
And what use is having a moderation policy when it isn’t getting implemented anyways? KSA can still post on Twitter. Hardcore pornography will continue to exist on Reddit. Users will continue to insinuate violence on Facebook.
Let's say that I want to start my own cloud hosting company. Say I'm Armenian and I don't want to host anything by the Turkish government. Shouldn't that be my right?
Say I have a Jewish employee who I don't want to offend, so I don't host holocaust denial websites. Shouldn't that be my right?
Let's say that I sign up Nike and they only agree to do it if I won't host Reebok. Shouldn't that be my right?
I don't see what's different here.
Amazon is far from a monopoly for web hosting. If you don't like their terms go elsewhere. If you are a cesspool like Parler, shame on you for not seeing the risk that AWS would drop you at some point.
There's all sorts of racist garbage on the internet and plenty of people with low standards or love of money who will host them. Go to one of them.
People keep bringing up ideology. This isn’t really about ideology, this is about violence. Parler was being used to organize violence.
So are Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, ...
IMO criminal behavior on social platforms should be investigated and prosecuted by the police and FBI etc. The same would presumably happen in your hotel analogy. Shutting them down doesn’t help with that.
In addition, social platforms of a certain size IMO should be treated more like a public infrastructure, because that’s what they effectively serve as. That’s a complex topic though.
I think it takes particular mental acrobatics to say that Parler has not been unfairly singled out here.
Morally, violent fascists have no place in society. This isn't a slippery slope. They're not coming for the Communists and Jews next. I have no sympathy for the poor, helpless Nazis being bullied by the big, bad liberals (as if the companies listed are even reliably liberal) when all they want to do is organize an overthrow or two of the US government. The big platforms have been obscenely deferent to the right wing for the past four years; ceasing to do business with them only after actual murder is about as limited a response as you can possibly imagine.
But, you say, companies are supposed to be amoral profit-generating machines? Ok, in that case, let's consider the cost-benefit analysis. Reputation matters. Continuing to do business with violent fascists is bad for reputation. How much money were they bringing in? Probably not much - Parler would have had a hard time getting advertisers, and it's not a system that will work well on a donation/subscription model. Easy decision.
Are we simply concerned in general that a few companies can "silence" certain kinds of speech? First, let's be very clear that if they're going to have that power at all, this is about the best and most restrained possible time for them to use it - relying on the rich and powerful to not abuse their power isn't a long-term strategy, but it's also not productive to whine when they use it in a way that benefits society. But also, it's not completely impossible for Parler to operate. They simply don't get to benefit from the infrastructure that those companies built. Should it be easier to be online and discoverable without those companies cooperating? Maybe, but I'm really hard pressed to imagine how decentralization, discoverability, and human laziness can all coexist. Keep in mind that part of what people like about app stores, for instance, is that they're curated. If Parler has to stay, is there anything beyond literal malware that you think could be removed?
(Full disclosure, I worked for one of those companies until recently.)
You are the problem.
The only issue I see frankly is that it took people this fucking long to wake up and stop playing the Trump game.
However I have sympathy for those that made this decision: The federal government is under control of one party now - they know that Clipper Chip 2.0 is a possibility.
Calls to violence are against their ToS and bannable. The scary screenshots you saw were self posted and screenshotted before they could be reported and taken down. You could do the same thing on Twitter / Reddit / etc.