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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

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jedberg

You forgot:

4. Their hosting provider could pull the power/network from their cabinet.

5. Law enforcement could just come and get their servers.

Both of which definitely happened in the 90s, and no one complained about.

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I definitely forgot about 4, but since the colo provider is also likely the ISP, I think this is effectively covered by 3, generalized to "ISP cancels its contract based on your bitstream or other reason".

5 doesn't really cover the scenarios that I think we're talking about. Yes, if you believe that we live in a fascist, near-fascist or just plain punitive state, then fear of law enforcement is probably going to make this concern rank fairly high for you. But I think for most of us, if law enforcement is coming to remove your servers from a colo facility, something much bigger is going on.

Do you think Parler's servers would still be in their possession if they had bare metal at a colo? I'm pretty sure the USSS would have already grabbed them to investigate threats against the life of the Vice President and Congress. In fact, being in the cloud probably saved them.

It's a good question. Did the USSS do anything re: investigating Parler while it was still up on AWS? What did they do? Did they grab servers? Did they grab anything?

Most likely yes, but of course we'll never know.

From your question & answer, I assume that you think it likely that the USSS (or FBI or whoever) would have moved to grab the hardware had there been hardware to grab?

It happened many times to Pirate Bay and plenty of people complained. They just had options on how to route around it.

Also, the pirate bay is still alive to date, so clearly it's doable. They've seen orders of magnitude more deplatforming than Parler did and they survived it, same for sci-hub. This is proof that it very much is possible to survive online, Parler just doesn't either doesn't have the skills or doesn't want to put in the effort.

They want to make as much noise about it as possible, because Parler has an axe to grind. If they got back on air too quickly they wouldn’t be able to make such a fuss.

I'm waiting for the not so distant possibility of power companies deciding to cut service to companies who host services they don't approve of. This is not a joke.

Luckily, since they are utilities, they can't.

So, ISPs should be a regulated utility, then?

For: yes, we should have regulation that ensures net neutrality, right down to "complete ignorance of the bitstream".

Against: ISP needs to cover more than just the last mile, and for everything except the last mile, competition seems like a positive thing (though potentially wasteful).

So I'd like to see all physical layer providers bound to absolute net neutrality (service and contracts can never be pulled based on contet), and the last mile regulated similarly to other utilities.

Yes! Most developed countries regulate them as regional monopolies anyways.

I thought about that too. But utility companies ARE legal monopolies. So you DON'T have a choice of providers.

Jeff Bezos wants us to think of Amazon as a utility, but this is obviously one way that it is very different.

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