Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm
reuters.com
reuters.com
Sadly in the alternate reality, people believe tomorrow the "Deep State" will install a regime to take over the country of the "true patriots"...
Server hosting is still entirely a commodity.
"Cloud Providers" are also a (smaller) commodity. Vendor tie-in (to things like AWS) is a problem for a number of businesses entirely less controversial than Parler.
Possibly not for long, though. There has been speculation that Google will push to have its "Advanced Protection" model extended to mass-market phones. This would make it impossible to side-load apps, except for that tiny minority of nerds like us who know how to enable ADB and push the app to the device over the command line.
People get confused about the difference between free expression, and compelling companies to support that expression.
Without state intervention, free market don't remain free on its own?
So, what is free about free markets?
In that framing, the market is free from economic privilege, and individual actors are free to compete on equal footing.
What confuses me is the overloading of "free market" to mean something opposed to government intervention.
Free market socialism isn't a contradiction, despite what many would have you believe (think: worker owned co-operatives and nonprofits that compete in the broader market).
Similarly, market economies need not be wholly unregulated to be good. And indeed, I think you'd be hard pressed to find mainstream economists who claim that worker safety regulations are bad (like, they might be able to point to particular regulations that are dumb, but there are many that are not).
That's the issue with Parler hosting. With hosting, you're digitally renting.
But this is being painted as "monopolies against free speech", and it's not. There's hundreds, maybe thousands of hosting companies. At least dozens of ways to take payments. Thousands of law firms.
I think everyone is in agreement that big tech has too much influence. But big tech isn't what's keeping Parler off the web. It's not "leftists" either. It's legal liability for things like the capital riots.
Legal liability, aka the threat of government is what's keeping Parker offline. Not big tech. All the US companies are just falling in line, protecting themselves from lawsuits and expensive court cases
Everybody got real nervous when people invaded the US Congress in order to stop it from certifying an election. Regardless of what you call that event, it was very illegal, and nobody wants to be anywhere near it should it happen again.
Perhaps Rebekah Mercer, the big money behind them, can buy a data center to house their servers, she has the money to do so. Or she can purchase a cloud/ISP company to house her other properties like Brietbart.
The new inception of the Moral Majority did.
I'm sure Rupert Murdoch would also be glad to contribute as well. Let capitalism thrive! AWS, Stripe, Paypal, GoFundMe have zero OBLIGATION to provide services to them.
Amazon's been receiving cia, military and other US government contracts for years now.
https://theatlantic.com/article/374632/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/08/75349/meet-ameri...
https://aws.amazon.com/contract-center/#federal
Amazon took a website off their services critical of the government and incoming administration.
If amazon did this to a company critical of one of their private contract companies, this would be anti-trust behaviour.
No it wouldn't be. That is not how anti-trust works. Amazon doesn't need to rent servers to Walmart. Walmart doesn't need to rent storage space or placement to Amazon. There's nothing in anti-trust which compells companies to have to provide services to one another.
If people want to talk about these issues they need to frame it in terms of strengthening anti-discrimination laws for speech. If that's something we want to talk about it's valid - it's just not the route most people getting angry about this want to take since it would run against many other opinions they've made previously (Masterpiece Cakeshop, et al.)
These companies openly take billions of dollars in government subsidies and tax breaks, most of them have one or more contracts with the US government, several of them received funding from the government during their early days, without which, there's a chance they may not be the giants they are today.
How much money should tax payers continue funding these massive corporations before they should finally get a say in their actions?
These companies willingly accept these billions of dollars, wllingly chose to put themselves in the position of being the 'new town square', then they hide behind the 'nope private company' argument.
All I know is, when I was working off government subsidies and grants years ago, i was publically accountable for anything we did and we had far less public impact than any of these companies.
People can argue laws and semantics all they want, but what will it actually take for people to actually recognize the power these companies have over nearly every aspect of modern life and stop just treating them as
'Any other private company'.
That's an excuse and as far as i'm concerned a completely bullshit one. It's very obvious that's not the case and how anyone can deny this is mind boggling to me.
/s.
edit. DDOS protection against free speech activists aiming to instill the values of free and uncensored speech on the rest of the ungrateful world
Robert Mercer put $10,000,000 into Parler, and they build out a WordPress app. I don't mean to be harsh, and I actually have a special affection for PHP (the first programming language I studied), but that is engineering malpractice.
Also FYI per the New Yorker story in 2018, Robert Mercer is the largest private owner of machine guns in the US. He runs them through the armory Centre Firearms [1].