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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

It's complicated. If you own a giant bar, should you be able to close down a tiny bar next door because there is hate speech inside, because you happen to be friends with the electric company?

Parler wanted to open a new platform and attract its own users. Only incidentally was it (like everything else these days) dependent on a number of other services to work.

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If you own a building and find out that the owners of a bar that rents space in your building are allowing a terrorist group to plan an insurrection, are you allowed to cancel the lease and evict them? Sure seems like a breach of lease to me.

I think this is a good analogy of where AWS sits here.

A lease is just a contract. It can specify conditions for termination. Without reading the contract, it's impossible to know if it is being breached or not.

It's a good analogy, and yes, criminal activity often breaks your lease agreement.

FTA

> of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler

As of this Thursday, 82 people have been arrested, according to one news report.

They may mostly use Android Phone. Should we ban them for Shops ?

Yes, most likely. Eviction is a legal process, involving the courts. Did that happen with Parler?

Have you read the "lease" in question?

https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

https://aws.amazon.com/aup/

I suspect Amazon is not the one to breach the lease.

>I suspect Amazon is not the one to breach the lease.

Yes, that was my point

> If you own a giant bar, should you be able to close down a tiny bar next door because there is hate speech inside.

No, and I didn't suggest that.

> electric company

Regulated. The electric company is a regulated monopoly. Hosting companies aren't. If an ISP had banned traffic from Parler, that would be an issue, it is a regulated monopoly. If Amazon shuts them down, there's no issue, it is an unregulated service provider.

Im not sure this is a good metaphor. None of Apple, Amazon, or Google (no matter how hard they try) are social media companies. None of them are in direct competition with Parler, and shutting it down wont increase their market share one iota. None of the social media companies are banning people because of things they said on Parler, and I doubt that the pressure applied to Apple/Amazon/Google came from outside the companies, this is most likely the result of engineers working on the AWS team pressuring their bosses, and it snowballing.

Thought exercise: what if say, Twitter, wanted to put one of its competitors out of business, and decided to engage in mass creation of accounts/content on that competing platform with the intention of violating their ToS and getting the platform kicked off of their hosting provider. Is this a viable business strategy now? Heck, is this even illegal?

When Parler became a liability for any company associated with it, to their shock, it turned out no company wanted to be associated with it. In a world where people "vote with their wallets" companies like Amazon, Google and Apple would prefer to avoid giving people a reason to do just that.

I don't understand the shock and surprise. No US company is going to choose anything over their own bottom line. Certainly not for a site as small and niche and literally riddled with hate speech as Parler.

Parler and it's customers can say whatever they want to whoever they want. Can they force Amazon to take their money? Absolutely not. Should they be able to? No: forcing Amazon to host Parler would be a violation of Amazon's own right to free speech.[0]

From Parler's point-of-view it would be unfortunate if they tied themselves to AWS specific infrastructure. There's absolutely no way that they now have some kind of "right" to be hosted by Amazon. Also, it's just poor planning on their part.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

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