Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.
I don't understand why they should have expected everyone to deplatform them. Facebook hosts the same content in far greater quantity and has clearly demonstrated that they can't moderate effectively, but there's no bulls-eye on them over that. What's different about Parler besides the ownership?
Facebook is 233x larger, profitable, and self-hosting - they don't have to keep their cloud service provider happy.
Parler was dependent on AWS for services but didn't comply with their terms.
Facebook is bigger, and has power.
That means that (a) they're harder to attack, and (b) they have purposes beyond ONLY fomenting insurrection and genocide. That means they'll operate in more of a gray area by intention, and will in fact try to self-moderate when the cost of fomenting insurrection and genocide risks becoming more expensive than the profit (ideological OR financial) for fomenting insurrection and genocide.
The difference between Parler and Facebook is, Facebook will take your money but then throw you under the bus if you're malicious and endangering their platform. Parler went down with the ship because it was more important to them than just taking the money.
And in any case, they own their own DC's.
Wait, which of those companies is using the publicly offered terms of any public cloud vendor?
> surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.
Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though
If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?
This is basic stuff, the problem with Parler is that their team seems to have no experience hosting controversial content.
But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.
It's fine to use k8s and containers, but don't lock yourself into Lambda, SQS, etc.
You should be able to spin up anywhere.
The sites you listed are notorious bad actors but they at least have a degree of moderation.
Imagine hypothetically that you have website about the plight of the Uyghurs and Amazon was a Chinese business.
Amazon's behavior revealed they are not above terminating service for businesses. I can imagine a world where they become emboldened and attempt to deny service to parties they don't like.
Perhaps you're hosted on AwS and they make an offer to acquire your business. Can they shut you off or raise your prices if you reject their offer? Can they escape antitrust scrutiny and use this as a strategy to low ball you?
I view the response to Parler as an operational test of the death star.
We have less and less power the larger these giants become.
As a society we make value judgements all the time. I think most people were in favor of shutting down parler. Most people are not in favor of letting AWS deny you service if you don't accept their aquisition offer and the response will be different.
I don't think we should force amazon to host ISIS' terrorist planning
What percentage of Parler users were advocating or planning for violent protest?
Also note that this stuff happens on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks all the time, and yet they're still online.
These are really messy gray areas, and the choices we're making will set precedents for our future.
There are so many potential responses by both the host and the service/platform. You can ask the network to deal with it (as they did with Parler), you can involve the FBI, invoke lawsuits... I don't think deplatforming is the second course of action to take when politely asking doesn't work out.
Was it even Amazon's prerogative to ask for content removal? It might be in their TOS, but what would the DOJ say?
Unless the FBI or CIA says it needs to go, I don't think it's Amazon's call. That should be our bar.
Social networks should be able to set their own rules and operate within the laws of the United States. Web hosts shouldn't meddle.