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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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