Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations"
What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
This isn't something Amazon isn't aware of, I went to the AWS Summit in NYC a few years ago and every few minutes the Keynote got interrupted by another protester yelling "Cut ties with ICE" and getting dragged out of the room. I don't think I was the only one quickly googling on their phones to figure out what they were talking about. I couldn't move my previous company off of AWS, but I moved all my personal servers and I steered my new company away from them.
Could you provide any sources for this? As it stands, I've seen zero tangible results regarding Amazon's ongoing unchecked growth, the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers, monopolistic practices, or any general "ethical" standing of the company.
Same goes for the US Government. Sure, you can vote for who you want and try to elect change, call your congress reps, and protest at the chambers, but it doesn't matter when they nothing gets done at the top level. Until there is an honest discussion had about immigration reform without a partisan spin put on everything, we won't get anywhere with ICE.
Is amazon unique in this because if not, it just feels pointless to complain about it as there is enough competition that if they don't do it, some competitor will and thus the only way you can fix it is through industry wide regulation.
I seriously doubt people think this.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/politics/hillary-clint...
[2]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/13/raid-veritas-okeefe...
[3]https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/intelligence-experts-refuse-to...
"Undocumented" is mostly just a euphemism for illegal. Amazon does a significant amount of shady things, selling servers to ICE isn't one of them. Open borders are neither feasible nor popular.
Hence 'Illegal Immigrant'.
It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares.
Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and give companies like Amazon orders to cease service if necessary. Or pass laws to require them to filter some extremely specific use cases, such as the dissemination of child pornography.
Mega corporations shouldn't be the ones deciding what is and is not a socially acceptable activity.
IMO it's even worse than that. Not only do we expect corporations to do the government's job, we're also giving corporations more power than we give governments.
Just look at the "it's a private company they can censor whoever they want!" crowd. They actually believe companies who control over half the content we're exposed to online should be able to censor and deplatform whoever they want for whatever reason they want.
I visit Canadian subreddits and they cheer when our telecom oligopoly censors RT news and unironically ask to "do fox news now!"
The part where they're given more power than we give the government.
Last I checked, political beliefs are not a protected class.
IMO they can't be trusted with having more power than the government. They have way too much control over what people consume on the internet.
The last thing I want is to give the government more power.
no shit, private companies have the power to set the compensation to whatever the fuck they want. end of story
It makes me wonder how much overlap there is between the "private companies can censor who they want" crowd and the "CEO salaries should be capped" crowd.
But that doesn't mean we can't have the social conversation over whether that's a reality we want to perpetuate. A tiny number of private companies have de facto control over what information the masses get exposed to, and to a lot of people, myself included, that just seems like an incredibly unhealthy state of affairs in the project towards an ever more vibrant civilization. We have the right to talk about it and decide to try to change the law.
There is an entire internet where you can get any type of information that suits your world view.
I don't want megacorps to take on the role of a government or law enforcement, but I do think there should be societal obligations and expectations towards corporations to use their property and power in a positive way for society. Current law is the overall minimum boundry, not the goal.
My current thought is, that this is mostly a matter of expectations, not actual change from the current state of things. If actors get away from our expectations, they should not be punished as if they broke a law, but it should prompt us to prepare one so it aligns with our expectations.
Maybe it is more a 'please don't force us to legislate every little thing' wishful thinking stance?
They are already doing the government's job by hosting their servers.
But why the fuck not? They hold an insane amount of power over people, directly and indirectly. The way for the people to have some power back over them is through unions. The fact that our entire system is set up to block collective bargaining is a huge artificial asymmetry.
There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
How about confiscating someone's fruit cart because they do not possess a licence for it? This led to Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself, which triggered the Arab Spring.
How about fining someone for refusing to use someone else's gender pronouns? Or for refusing to perform a Brazilian wax on the male genitalia of a male who asserts they are a woman?
If not, then I question the existence of any underlying principle, beyond ideology, guiding their assessments.
>>There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
The UDHR, as interpreted by the UNHR High Commission, explicitly defines "collective bargaining rights" as a human right:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
Laws that grant collective bargaining rights mandate an employer to engage in collective bargaining with any set of his workers that form a union and demand collective bargaining, to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker or job applicant. Such a government mandate is a blatant violation of the right to free association, and thus property understood as a violation of human rights. In fact, it violates article 20 of the UDHR, which states:
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
>>Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
Has Ki-Moon ever explicitly told any other UN branch to cut it with its rhetoric and unabashed partisan bloc voting?
"Quite easily" is a stretch, that document is a well-intentioned mess. It omits rights that many take for granted, and the interpretation of many of them is highly subjective.
For instance, Article 10 gives everybody the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal. But it doesn't recognize the right to a trial by a jury of your peers.
Article 12 forbids attacks on somebody's honor or character. Does this mean calling a politician a lying scumbag is a violation of that politicians human rights? And how does this square with Article 19, which states that everybody has a right to freedom of expression?
Article 16 states that men and women have a right to get married, but the phrasing could be interpreted to only protect heterosexual marriages. (Probably provided by Article 2, but that could be debated.)
Article 25 states that mothers and children are entitled to special care and assistance, but says nothing of fathers. This seems to violate Article 2.
Article 26 says that elementary education shall be compulsory, but also states that parents have the right to decide what kind of education their children receive. Does that mean that Germany banning homeschooling is a violation of the rights of parents? Or maybe homeschooling itself a violation of a child's right to compulsory education? Can a parent choose to send their child to the "school of hard-knocks working in a coal mine"? What if instead of a coal mine, it's an illiterate tribal lifestyle with a high child mortality rate? Is a government compelled or forbidden to force native children into schools, as Canada and other countries infamously did in the past?
Article 27 seems to suggest that copyright and patent protections are a human right, but doesn't establish any limitations to this right. Are patents expiring after ~20 years a violation of the human rights of inventors?
Article 29 gives an escape clause allowing a democratic government to limit any of these rights whenever doing so is in the interest of morality, public order, or general welfare of the democratic society. What the hell does any of that mean in practice?
Article 30 can be interpreted to contradict Article 19, forbidding people from criticizing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if they do so with the intent of destroying any these supposed human rights. Does that mean protesting against copyright is a violation of human rights?
Basically, corporate politics as usual - they call the shots, everyone else tows the line, they dress up the results as a win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
How about we start with rape, torture, and murder, and work our way back.
But like really. How do we figure anything out? We work at it, we learn we make mistakes and we grow. It seems like just throwing you're hands up is oppositional to the entire notions of innovation that guide tech companies in the first place.
It's hard but we pay CEO's $21 million dollars a year to do hard things.
*21m/yr, if you read the details.