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Comment by pocw | Hacker News Reader

That works until your colo provider tells you to take a walk. Your landlord evicts you from warehouse where you host your backup datacenter space, your ISP cuts you off. It's almost like everybody drew the line at openly planning insurrection. Maybe they could have tried not doing that?

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4chan, Stormfront, Gab, and plenty of other sites are alive and well, so I don't even buy the "what if datacenters and ISPs ban us?" argument.

I think the difference is that the Parler CEO touted their unique (i.e. lack of) moderation as a feature of their website.

The sites you listed are notorious bad actors but they at least have a degree of moderation.

Plenty of sites stay up that are not liked by powers to be. White supremacist forums. Or Pirate Bay

White supremacists are well liked by the powers that be though?

Some of 'em. Depends on who you ask. It's bad for business in a global economy.

You're making a value judgment when my argument is simply about keeping your website alive in the face of powers that wish to control or censor you.

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.

I don't buy this argument. Saying "because they banned parler they might lowball you on an aquisition offer and deny you service if you don't accept" is a complete non-sequitur.

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.

Alternatively, pretend you're Isis, and want to start up a website on AWS so you can plan terrorist attacks on US soil, maybe blow up Jeff's ball's in Seattle?

I don't think we should force amazon to host ISIS' terrorist planning

And what if it happens with 0.01% of users on a popular Muslim social network?

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.

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