Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

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> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?

I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be).

Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.

This line of thinking is similar to what happened in the deep south before the civil rights movement. Private businesses didn't want to serve African Americans and the excuse given was its their right to refuse service. Except when all private businesses colluded to deny service to African Americans to enforce an informal segregation.

Eventually the federal government came in and decided race was a protected class.

Obviously the problem isn't as simple as saying Google or anyone else must allow certain groups to use their platforms. Because that compels speech. Which the government also can't do.

Proper legal experts would have to craft it but I think the limit should be somewhere around access and use of the infrastructure. Domain registrars and hosts cannot discriminate. However If Twitter doesn't want someone on their platform I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to kick them. We just cant allow for those paltform hosts to collude with the infrastructure providers to deplatform others completely.

And I can think of two reasons why from a legal standpoint. 1: most of the internet infrastructure in the US was built with public dollars. Even if its nominally owned by a private ISP, they were paid by the government to build it. Historically the courts have used government funds as a way to enforce legal limits.

2: coordinated deplatforming like what happened with Parlor looks an awful lot like it was an intentional hit to take out a potential competitor to the current online status quo. That should worry everyone really.

Google and Apple have a duopoly on mobile platforms, which are the natural place for any communication app. If those two act in concert you are facing a monopoly. There are only two ways out. Competition or regulation.

For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.

Regulatory capture prevents competition. Money influencing politics prevents regulation.

Up to a certain point. No amount of money would prevent congress from toughening bank regulations after the financial crisis. I also doubt that the republicans are going to give big tech companies a pass when they come back to power.

What regulation prohibits you from making a phone OS, even for an existing phone? Or your own android build? Or your own store on Android?

You can't get an OnlyFans app in Google or Apple's app stores either, much as I'm sure the company in question would like the exposure of having one, because much of that website's user generated content also falls foul of Google and Apple's content policies. I don't understand what appears to be a commonly held view that it was fine for the appstore duopoly to deem content unsuitable for their store until the content in question was calls to hang the vice president and shitposts about Jews.

Yeah, I think that both of those things should probably have more public input when the players at hand effectively control the entire market for smartphones in the US.

We have strong bill of rights restrictions on governmental power because of the massive amount of power held by the government. So having that power be controlled by small numbers of entirely unaccountable figures with more power than the government in certain areas doesn't seem better at all?

I think the main thing is if you want to make a case for there being anti-trust or user freedom or dubious moderation priorities issues with app stores, a campaign centred around examples other than Parler is much more likely to win widespread support.

Market share is low, but there certainly are other mobile OS options out there. The fact that people in general don't want to use them doesn't make Android & iOS a "duopoly".

With a Parler, the dependence on aws, twilio, and other solutions took them out of the iaas world and into paas and saas. They depended on Amazon and other vendor solutions, so migrating to anything else would be almost impossible.

Yeah, but one could argue that is their fault that they leaned into AWS vendor lock-in. They should've architected cloud-agnostically

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