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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

For sure, that's horrible. But the hot question is: is Amazon the entity who should decide to shut it down?

I would personally prefer to have that decision be taken by a governmental agency or anything else managed by an elected person. Now, I'm not a US citizen, and I have zero trust in the current US administration, but in a "normal" context I would want to have at least some governmental overview of the shutdown process instead of delegating the full power to a private corporation.

Edit: In a "Trump" context, I really don't know... Really sad to see this country dying slowly.

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Here's another hot question: if it were your computer, would you like a government agency telling you if you should leave it up or take it down?

Not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.

The content is hosted on a computer owned by a corporation, not the government. Many people interpret this as their decision to make, rather than the government's. If you don't believe so, you'll have to describe the ways in which their rights to their computers differ from yours.

See my response here, I believe that's also relevant to your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25764333

In short, Amazon is not a public utility. Maybe it could be in the future but it isn't right now. AWS is a private business which rents out a server under very clearly laid out TOS to follow. In addition to this, AWS has gone out of their way for weeks (if not months) to work with Parler on their moderation issue that violates the contract.

Parler has shown no intent to work within the boundaries of AWS TOS. Instead of putting in the work of finding and migrating to other hosting solutions (of which there are many) they used stall tactics. When stalling no longer worked, they brought a junk lawsuit against AWS.

I think Amazon the entity is exactly the right person to decide who their customers are and what their contractual obligations are to those customers.

If I ran a SaaS I definitely wouldn't want to submit a form to some government entity and wait 3 months for some bureaucrat to decide whether or not I can stop serving a customer that I am contractually allowed to stop serving.

I get your point, and understand your position. For my SaaS I also wouldn't want to deal with something like Parler. That being said, I don't personally believe that your analogy of your (or my own) SaaS platform is that relevant. The difference here is that Amazon could be considered a major infrastructure provider. It has around 30% of the cloud market share, which puts it in a very powerful category if they have the power to shutdown platforms. I personally do not feel comfortable giving that much power to a corporate entity without some level of overview by citizens (aka the government).

> It has around 30% of the cloud market share, which puts it in a very powerful category if they have the power to shutdown platform.

It only had that power because Parler gave it to them. Parler didn't have to sign a contract they couldn't fulfill. And Parler will be able to find another way to host.

Parler's own CEO admits they purposely built their infrastructure with the expectation that AWS would pull the cord for TOS violations and they have options. The truthiness of that statement seems in question as it's now Jan 14 and Gab has pretty much already (struggled) to fill the vacuum left behind by Twitter and Parler.

Relevant part of the document:

>Parler’s allegations of harm contradict its own public statements. Parler’s CEO has assured users that Parler “prepared for events like [the termination] by never relying on Amazon's [sic] proprietary infrastructure,” that the site will be fully operational “with less then[sic] 12 hours of downtime” after termination, and that Parler has “many [companies] competing for [its] [hosting] business.”

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