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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

> Parler should not have been de-platformed

You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services.

Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

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> You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP.

AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use"

"Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless.

This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

It's a lot cheaper and easier (and less likely to involve swat teams) than hiring some sketchy DDoS outfit.

AWS provided multiple times over evidence of violent content that was against their policies and asked Parler to step up moderation, which didn't happen.

AWS arguments:

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349200096345296897?s=20

> Parler itself has admitted it has a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violates its (minimal) community standards that it had not yet reviewed

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349203942614335488?s=20

> When I said Amazon cited many vile and violent examples of posts that it flagged for Parler, I meant it. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErlVjN7U0AEr1gt?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErlVjPBVEAEs9sg?format=jpg&name=...

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349202898459115520?s=20

> Such a requirement also poses a risk to Amazon itself, with posts calling for others to "burn down Amazon delivery trucks" until they "reverse course."

I wonder whose side the FSF would take.

Amazon shouldn't be making these decisions, and certainly not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements. This should have been litigated in court prior to taking deplatforming actions.

Imagine if Amazon was a Chinese company and Parler hosted information about the plight of the Uyghur people.

Community websites have the right to enforce rules. I'm not so sure common carriers do, and AWS is a common carrier. A good rule of thumb for American hosting companies is if the FBI won't seize the website for the content hosted therein, the website shouldn't be removed.

For context, I'm a liberal and dislike the content on Parler. Defending free speech is more important than zapping the republicans. Imagine if the tables were flipped and talking about abortion was what conservatives wanted to ban.

> Amazon shouldn't be making these decisions, and certainly not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements

Amazon is still working with Parler to export their data off of AWS.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

> We will ensure that all of your data is preserved for you to migrate to your own servers, and will work with you as best as we can to help your migration

Taking the services entirely offline then giving them a few weeks to access archived data does not entirely cover the definition of (at least in my opinion):

> not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements

Going entirely offline like that can easily destroy a web business. Or at a minimum seriously harm them.

Not to say I care much for Parler's technical nor administrative approach to providing free speech.

Why aren't you hosting them?

Because they're not Amazon.

Parler ignored repeated notices of TOS violations from Amazon, were given a chance to address their frequent TOS violations and incomplete enforcement of TOS violation notices, and came back with a very weak plan while still ignoring specific TOS violations AWS had notified them of.

Parler had ample time. They ignored warnings, they did not address their TOS violations. Then their contract was terminated, and AWS is helping them migrate after the fact. Parler displayed an ignorance of the law and how web hosting works.

Web companies that repeatedly violate the TOS of their hosts deserve to be at the mercy of their failover plans. That responsibility is borne by the web company, not the host.

AWS is not a common carrier

At their size, they sure seem like it.

What happens when AWS and Azure design their own silicon, outstrip other hosting providers, and then become the only hosts on the internet?

Are they common carriers then?

Nah, anyone can set up a host.

What does "outstrip" even mean? Physically ripping the silicon out from the servers in your garage?

It means overtake or outcompete. In this case they’re saying that the big cloud hosting providers could end up in a monopoly like position that smaller companies couldn’t compete with if they developed their own superior server tech.

Don't AWS, GCP, and Azure have the majority of the market already? What would them having their own silicon change?

Oh sorry, I’m not defending the point just explaining what outstrip meant in context of it.

Size doesn't have anything to do with it. No matter how big AWS and Azure get or what hardware they use, you can host a website out of a computer in your closet or the phone in your hand. No one needs them to operate, it's just convenient & cost-effective to do so.

This is a valid thought experiment to consider.

I'm old enough that racking my own boxes and hosting everything myself is both natural and easy (and cheaper and faster).

But working with plenty of young developers, most don't have any exposure or interest in setting up anything other than AWS services tied together.

So like it or not (I don't) we're rushing towards a world where AWS (maaybe GCP, mostly not) is the only way to build something.

It's good to consider the implications of this.

That’s not true though.

By volume, GoDaddy is actually a bigger host than AWS by a factor of 2.

The HN crowd vastly overestimates how big AWS is compared to less sexy options.

The difference is that AWS hosts big clients and makes big bucks in return. Godaddy's hosting had 300m in revenue[0], while AWS did nearly 13 billion[1].

0: https://www.zdnet.com/article/godaddy-q3-revenue-beats-expec....

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/aws-earnings-q4-2020.html#Bo....

It's definitely true that AWS customers spend more than Godaddy customers, for sure. But I still reject the idea that you have to use AWS (or will in the near future). There are literally hundreds of hosting providers out there, thousands if you include places that will run your own hardware. In my own career only half of my jobs have depended on AWS in any capacity; the rest used other hosting providers or self hosted.

In a very real way, a founder today has more options for hosting than they do for catered lunch.

Common carriers are regulated entities like shipping companies and telecoms. You get to be one through a huge amount of bureaucracy, negotiation with regulators, etc. It protects you from a lot of liability but also creates a lot of constraints on what you can do, what you can charge, etc. Either way, you don't just wake up one morning and discover that your company has become one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

AWS is not a common carrier. They are a hosting company. There are hundreds (thousands?) of hosting companies to choose from and you are not even required to use one to host a website on the Internet. You are free to host your website yourself on your own hardware.

I'd imagine that the FSF would say parler should be using free software for their hosting, so that they can switch to local hosting if they want

Their position is usually to not rely on non free software

Parler was, by the by. The issue is that their hardware requirements were bonkers, so finding a new host capable of giving them a few hundred servers and dedicated 10G internal network capacity wasn’t trivial.

>"Always abide by your host's AUP." These basically say things like "your users may not use the services to offend others." That's literally impossible to abide by. In fact, it appears to have been a company-ending event in this case, which makes it a devilishly simple attack: post something you know will get everyone worked up, et viola: you just killed a company.

The way you're wording this sounds very much like you haven't actually seen the kind of stuff that was going on there. It's not simply a matter of people being offended.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. I read the AWS response. Nothing there seemed to be much worse than I've seen on Twitter (actually, Twitter stuff was far worse).

Regardless, this is besides the point: all a competitor has to do is post some garbage and point to it, and boom, you're dead. That's not ok.

>Regardless, this is besides the point: all a competitor has to do is post some garbage and point to it, and boom, you're dead. That's not ok.

In this case, they pointed to it weeks prior and it wasn't removed.

Amazon claims this, and Parler disputes that this was brought to their attention. (it's not easy to ramp up moderation overnight -- and FB/Twitter have consistently had far worse, even with far larger moderation teams.)

Doing just easy things isn't much of a business model.

How many years did Twitter exist before hiring big teams of moderators?

Removing the specific examples included in the complaint can't be that hard though. One person should be able to do it in a day or two

I agree, which makes Parler's dispute over Amazon's claimed timeline far more plausible to me.

> Regardless, this is besides the point: all a competitor has to do is post some garbage and point to it, and boom, you're dead. That's not ok.

That is not what happened however. That is quite manipulative framing spread by Parler.

What happened was that Amazon itself identified those few dozen posts and asked Parler to remove them. Parler did not done that and claimed it is difficult for them. Amazon is not Parlers competitor. Amazon gave Parler plenty of time to remove those posts. The issue was that Parler was unwilling to do so, because they whole thing was to be safe place of exactly that sort of comments.

Twitter does not have too good moderation, but they are not refusing to take down inciting posts on principle. They did regularly took down accounts and tweets in the past. There is difference between not doing it perfectly and refusing to even try.

This may be true. It wouldn't surprise me if Parler said "no" when asked to take them down, but I didn't see that even in Amazon's court filing.

However, I don't think Amazon should interfere in customers' businesses and harm the relationship between customers and third parties (the users). What if Amazon had said, "Netflix, we find the Cuties movie offensive. We have shut you off and will delete all of your data within 24 hours."

> didn't see that even in Amazon's court filing.

That is exactly what is in Amazons court response. You either did not read it or are lying.

> Nothing there seemed to be much worse than I've seen on Twitter (actually, Twitter stuff was far worse).

https://i.redd.it/om90nwadqca61.png is a Parler post with a racial slur and 25k upvotes. Twitter has its issues but an equivalent comment isn't going to survive two days.

The court documents from their case against Amazon are available at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a.... Amazon's declarations contain other examples of content that wouldn't survive on Twitter.

> Regardless, this is besides the point: all a competitor has to do is post some garbage and point to it, and boom, you're dead. That's not ok.

According to https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-... it took several months of moderation problems before AWS dropped Parler as a client. If Parler had done more active moderation and tried harder to keep Amazon happy they'd still be hosted on AWS.

Yeah, that's a disgusting comment and it's far worse that it received upvotes if that screenshot is accurate. Nevertheless, it is legal free speech, even if it makes me very angry.

Legal free speech does not mean that a private company is obligated to host it.

The problem with Parler is not that the users didn't abide by the policy of "your users may not use the services to offend others." The problem was that the administration side refused to attempt to enforce any semblance of rules on the platform.

>"Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless.

>This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

What's the probability at any given time that someone on HN is offended? YCombinator seems to use Amazon's Route 53 and would therefore be at risk.

  Domain Name: YCOMBINATOR.COM
  Registry Domain ID: 147225527_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net
  Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net
  Updated Date: 2020-02-15T20:11:05Z
  Creation Date: 2005-03-20T23:51:07Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2021-03-20T22:51:07Z
  Registrar: Gandi SAS
  Registrar IANA ID: 81
  Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@support.gandi.net
  Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +33.170377661
  Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
  Name Server: NS-1411.AWSDNS-48.ORG
  Name Server: NS-1914.AWSDNS-47.CO.UK
  Name Server: NS-225.AWSDNS-28.COM
  Name Server: NS-556.AWSDNS-05.NET

> Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

Except that's not how it works in the slightest. You have moderation in place to work to prevent that. You are doing your due diligence. You are making an honest effort to solve this problem. Mistakes will happen. Nothing is perfect, but you are making an honest attempt, and it's reasonably effective.

Parler was not doing anything close to that.

Your comment operates under the belief that these things are binary. Simply post one thing someone can find offensive, and "I win!"

But most people, most successful companies, are smarter than that and operate in reality.

When Parler reviewed the AWS terms, the vagueness of "offensiveness" would have been a good reason for them (of all companies) not to select AWS as a hosting platform. Anyone who pays attention to this space could have warner Parler; similar things have happened to other sites, like Gab, on AWS. They weren't diligent, they selected a provider incompatible with their business goals, and they suffered the consequences.

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