100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation.
Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).
Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).
Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your application such that you can move it to another cloud vendor.
If your content is so toxic that other cloud vendors won't accept you either, then maybe the problem isn't with the cloud vendors.
I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?
"Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?"
Either both are illegal or neither is. If anything, the many of the anti-Trump rumors have reached a point that the anti-Obama have never had.
I remember back when the Internet was the place to be open minded and avoid the real world biased or ill-informed discussions. Now its the total opposite.
I haven't seen the examples that AWS provided to Parler, but I trust that AWS lawyers signed off on the plan so they show a lack of moderation on Parler's part.
If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law.
AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.
So you're in favor of removing moderation entirely and hosting providers given broad immunity from liability for any type of content -- feel free to plot your murder, host child porn, plan an insurrection, whatever; and it should be up to the government to track down the responsible parties.... even if those parties are untraceable or not even in the USA?
AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.
So you don't dispute that Parler violated the ToS, you're disputing the ToS themselves and that they unfairly target companies like Parler?
I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities.
Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason. If they wanted to turn a blind eye, they would have kept it anonymous.
It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.
They didn't say "98 people posted bad things so you suck", they said that Parler was lacking a system to prevent those kinds of posts and provided 98 examples.
I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities.
Why do you think that Parler should be able to moderate their users, ban them or report them to authorities, but AWS should not be allowed to do the same with their own customers?
This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear
That's the funny thing about ethics -- everyone has their own set of ethics. I think that if a site abuses the ToS of a provider and allows their platform to be used to plan an insurrection, then that provider ought to be able to terminate services.
Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason
You don't need to give ID to post on Parler. Becoming verified gives you some additional access/visiblity (for example, users can block posts from unverified users), but verification is not neccessary to post.
Or, should AWS be forced to host the Daily Stormer against their own freedom of association?
Even still, the first amendment doesn't cover calls to action so even this would have been well within legal rights to block or terminate.
Note that my understanding is that hosting someone else’s illegal speech is not in itself illegal (if it was, the buzzfeed article would also need to be taken down).
But determining what counts as inciting violence is harder to determine. You can't post images of children that were actually exploited and later declare with plausible deniability that the content of those images were not to be taken seriously, because they act as photographic evidence of a crime. But how many people that post online about hanging a politician would really act on those words if the politician was within arm's reach?
It's another question as to whether or not child pornography incites child exploitation, instead of just incentivizing it, similar to the argument that pornography incites rape. But it seems to be agreed on that humanity would be better off without it entirely, to the point of very harsh legislation. I'm wondering if this is the direction some people would want to take the spreading of misinformation and alleged incitement. I wonder how many people who distribute child pornography would change their outlook on it in the face of evidence.
Parler was not, and in all likelihood, cannot be convicted, because they were only sharing speech. The SCOTUS even ruled that anti-gay-marriage was considered free and protected speech because a good percent of the population has different opinion than the rest. Same for pro-Trump material. He had seventy two million votes just a couple of months ago. That's not the same as child abuse which is universally condemned by the entire population.
Just imagine how much that would be in Facebook numbers? I think we can block Facebook too, no?
That's not the point, i'm ~sure that illegal stuff is removed from parler too, and if not that's the Justice who should make the rules and NOT Amazon...like you know Facebook just made those moderation's after a justice ruling.
And AWS said:
“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”
If they were removing the illegal content, then why did AWS say they don't have an effective process to remove it? If they can show that they already have effective moderation, then they should win their lawsuit against AWS and quickly be back online.
Because you get a Sympathy-Star-Sticker in your book and Amazon is the good guy who try's to safe the United States, it's more Marketing then real fear being extreme right wing.
BTW: Wanna buy a real Postage stamp from Hitler? No Problem:
https://www.amazon.com/STRIKING-ORIGINAL-ANNIVERSARY-SEIZING...
or a beautiful flag?
https://www.amazon.ca/German-Imperial-Germany-Ensign-Flags/d...
The original "Mein Kampf" without comments?
https://www.amazon.ca/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler/dp/0395925037/...
On the other hand, inciting violence is illegal:
"by all the Patriots descending on Washington DC on #jan6 ....come armed...."
Another expletive-laced message posted the day before the riot warned: "To all our enemies high and low you want a war? Well you're asking for one...To the American people on the ground in DC today and all over this great nation, be prepared for anything."
That's not violent per se, maybe the right wing is in fear of polar bears near the Capitol. Please don't get me wrong, but if you let big Marketplaces and not Justice make decisions whats right or wrong...well then that can go really fast the other way too.
The provisions against incitement of violence in the AWS TOS are standard. If Parler sues AWS, a court will actually decide on whether Parler violated the TOS. And I'm pretty sure that the AWS decision will hold. They didn't do this lightly.
Refusing service to trolls is a standard occurrence. The justice system would be clogged immediately if it were forced to decide every TOS violation before the accused party could be banned.
Really disappointed in HN right now, hacking youtube videos are dangerous too no? Content is not dangerous, peoples are.
That's a private rule and with Amazon as big as it is, we need to have a discussion if a TOS is even legal, if you take a blind eye on that, nothing stands in the way that big company's take over everything, if you want such a world...well then welcome to cyberpunk.
I don't see how you could argue that a TOS is not legal when both parties signed and agreed to it.
Because it clashes often with existing law, many TOS's you can simply ignore (at least in europe) and yes even when you signed it. A TOS does not stand above existing law.
Lesson of the day, if you're doing shady shit, own your own servers and stay off mine.
That means you as a Infrastructure provider can jugge what normally justice will do, but when you have the money to run your own DC you can jump over that problems? Don't you see that this is the opposite of a free society? It does not matter if it's extreme right or left, Wikileaks, Wikipedia Pirate-bay or Sci-hub.
BTW: Totally not right wing, but in a free an fair society justice should have the decision if a Service is illegal and NOT Market-providers like Amazon Google or Apple.
You can't since you still need to have an upstream internet provider. (or in the case of Facebook, access to internet exchange points). If Facebook was promoting illegal content, even if they host their own servers, they'd lose their internet connectivity.
Did Parler promote illegal content? Again, Amazon is NOT a Court.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/tech/parler-amazon-lawsuit/in...
In fact this new form of justice is so efficient we can even shut down a company before the court proceedings have even started. By we I mean our corporate overlords, but they wouldn’t ever turn on us.
This isn't a new form of justice, this is how the civil legal system works.
Funny, Hitler and Staling would agree with you 100%
I'm done.
Which is what provides checks and balances, AWS says "You violated our ToS, we're cutting you off", "Parler sues and says 'No we didn't and here's why'".
If Parler wins and can prove that they were unfairly targeted, then they can sue Amazon for damages. Which is what keeps Amazon from unfairly applying its ToS. And if they can demonstrate irreparable harm, then they can get an injunction forcing AWS to restore their services immediately rather than waiting for the court case to be decided.
But I think the best they could do is present monetary damages, which the court could decide AWS is able to pay.
If you want entitlement to a court on the legality of content before getting cutoff from service, negotiate a contract that specifies that you can carry any legal content, and the other party must assume content is legal absent a determination by a court to the contrary.
OTOH, that’s not part of anyone’s boilerplate, and adds a lot of potential cost, so expect to pay an extremely hefty premium to get a business to agree to those terms.
98 examples is nothing. We dealt with an entire year of content on Facebook encouraging and inciting violence but it was okay because it was aligned ideologically with the powers that be.
I personally lost track of how many people just in my own friend's list advocating for "punching nazis", where "nazis" is a generic term for "anyone I strongly disagree with politically". Heck, I saw multiple people post videos of violence against people they consider "nazis" and celebrating it.
Personally, I'm 100% against the violence both last year and on Jan 6th, but it's amazing how egregious the double standard is between last year and Jan 6th.
But that doesn't mean that I can help someone load a body into his car, then tell police later "Well, I wasn't sure if he was legally killed or not, so I was just trying to help out, it's not my job to determine legality, I was going to come in later today and ask you guys about that. You can probably still catch him if you want to, I got his contact info: he said his name was John and his car said he lives in the Ukraine"
Yes, unless there is a court judgement I missed. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of the land.
Amazon is leading Cloud yes, but it stands at 40% market share at best. Azure/GCP are pretty competent alternatives, though I am not sure if they would not do the same as AWS (probably yes)
The wider impaction to me, is that AWS is setting some precedent, and many people are not fully comfortable with it, and I think it will haunt AWS for a long time to come.
There is not reason at all to have your content hosted in the US if you felt its legislators or IT providers aren't up to par to your idea of what free speech represents. Credibility? Yeah, seems that the crediblity issues weren't exactly about the hosting provider.
The legislative and judicial system didn't say anything about Parler, and that's the core of the problem. Big tech acted by themselves to appease the new king.
AWS can say “we don’t want Parler as a customer” but they cannot say “we don’t serve black people on our platform” as race is a protected class while being Parler is not.
Edit: an unfairly flagged comment in reply to this says > Why would democrats break up Amazon, when it helps them in banning the republicans? That will not happen.
That's exactly my point, this is a form of lobbying to stay on good side of the government.
There are many other hosting providers in the world. If Parler hadn't hosted its service on AWS, then Amazon wouldn't be able to shut them down.
Even distribution centres operate on the cloud these days.
Cloud migration at any scale isn’t a 24 hour process.
> It can only shut down a company from using its services.
> Amazon can't shut down *any* company at the push of a button
If you've chosen to use AWS, then yes, Amazon can shut that down. If your business relies critically on AWS, then yes, Amazon can shut down your business.
But they can't shut down *any* company. There are lots of companies that don't rely on AWS and Amazon can't shut them down.
And it’s actually not illegal to host other people’s illegal speech. It’s super pedantic, but also very important!
So what did Parler do that was illegal?