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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

I will be shocked if this doesn't have multiple test cases. Hosters have been choosing which kind of content they will host for decades with porn being the largest theme that is banned on many hosts. AWS pulling them from their servers is for me the least controversial of all the things that have happened.

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> the least controversial

except for the timing (immediately post-Georgia runoff), the sudden reversal in policy, the possible appearance of collusion or antitrust violation (something else the courts will likely decide), Amazon's responses to similar speech on other hosted customer sites, and of course, what's actually written in the contract between the two companies. Not saying Parler has a valid case, but there are plenty of issues to sort through, it's not as cut-and-dry as you seem to think.

One of the complaints argues "...requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service". There may be exclusions or other terms which override the 30-days, if so, surely that will come out during discovery or via Amazon's response.

1) Parler provided no evidence that AWS colluded with Twitter, Facebook or anyone else. And they have banned plenty of people in the past without needing advice or permission from a third party.

2) AWS has a market share in "cloud" of 32% where there is a vibrant array of competitors e.g. Alibaba, Azure, DigitalOcean, GCP, Oracle, IBM, Tencent etc. And in the broader hosting space their share is likely to be in the single digits. Any notion of an antitrust violation seems baseless.

Those might be valid defenses, ultimately it appears a court will decide. As far as #1, one might potentially argue that the evidence is the banning of Parler by Apple and Google's app stores, plus revocations from Stripe, Twilio and others, all within 48 hours. Further, it also coincided with Twitter (a much larger AWS customer) banning Donald Trump. #2 is probably not so simple either, as Google (i.e. GCP) was one of the participants in the ban, and a bunch of those other companies aren't US-based. It's why we have courts and juries.

One might also argue that since Parler hosted illegal content that it's fairly normal that companies would not want to associate with them.

Illegal content is decided by courts

Going with this comment and the idea that only the courts can decide if content is illegal. The idea that a hoster can't take down a child porn website because they haven't been to court is completely outragous. There are things that we clearly know to be illegal and we don't need the courts to tell us.

The legality of stuff is something the is judged in a court of law against the laws emitted by the representatives of the people.

From this things get complicated. Some stuff is obviously illegal and people know it. And other stuff some people agree with and others don't.

What do you think happens when a public corporation takes the role of a judge and sides with either party? Where is the legality of this?

Since you mention children. WTF is going on in USA with the gender changes on children? This should be considered child abuse and parents should be stripped from their rights. Or is this not on par with child pornography?

> except for the timing (immediately post-Georgia runoff)

Seems to me that the timing was after a seditious mob tried to mount an insurrection against the elected government while they were trying to fulfill their constitutional duties. Like it or not, that's not something any major corporation wants to be associated with.

There may be exclusions or other terms which override the 30-days

There are. From what I can see, section 7.2.b.ii.A via 6.1.b and 8.2.c (violation of the Acceptable Use Policy due to harmful or offensive content) or possibly even 6.1.a.i (security risk to third party) of the AWS Customer Agreement could apply.

According to the Amazon letter, over the "past several weeks", Parler was asked to remove 98 posts by AWS, which they allegedly did not do in a timely manner. Parler claims that's a misrepresentation, because they removed everything they were asked to "over the last few days".

They argue they moderate as much as needed (in their opinion). So they say, why twitter is OK? It becomes discriminating incident and not just "Per Policy" incident

Does Twitter run on AWS?

It looks like they have their own infrastructure:

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

Looks like it: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/twitter-taps-aws-for-its-l...

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