eejit_compiler

By my calculations, this is somewhere between 11,680 and 18,560 vCPUs and 83,840 to 122,880 GB of RAM they're asking for.

Seems rather excessive for a mid-tier social networking website.

The AWS name wasn't associated with Parler and the Capitol insurrection, but it likely would have been. This is all about getting ahead of the story and limiting any potential brand damage.

It's similar to when Cloudflare booted 8chan, after the latter was linked to the white nationalist terrorist attacks in Christchurch and El Paso.

I don't understand the rationale for your view. Why would slapping down a potential Twitter competitor be any concern of AWS?

> This is the only actual violence that happened and it was an overreaction by the police.

Not true. The mob physically attacked the Capitol police, repeatedly, with a variety of weapons. One of the policemen, who was struck in the head by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher, later died from his injuries.

> It’s like how a bar doesn’t need to have 100% of its customers be bikers to be known as a biker bar.

Reminds me of this bartender tale: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

What Parler was, was bad for business. It's not a good look for AWS to be hosting websites with violent content linked to the Capitol insurrection, and apparently doing nothing about it. So they pulled the plug.

This is about web hosting companies not wanting to be associated with a site linked to the Capitol insurrection.

It has nothing to do with any supposed "cancel culture".

I think the general guideline is, don't provide your hosting provider with incentives to enforce their terms of service against you, to the point where you're denied any further business from them.

8chan (8kun) is back online, yes. They just used a different hosting provider.

It's not, this has happened many times previously.

Including against similarly far-right sites, e.g. Stormfront, Gab, 8kun/8chan, etc. All of which are still operational, after changing hosting providers.

Yes but considering the business Parler are in, i.e. publishing the sort of controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites, they would have been wise to have a disaster recovery plan for hosting that covered this possibility.

Thanks for clarifying your position, but I still don't quite see how this applies to Parler in terms of their decision to host upon AWS. There are many thousands of other hosting companies worldwide, they didn't have to use one of the big three IaaS providers.

It seems more like poor planning on their part: over-reliance on specific services of a single provider, and no disaster recovery plan for if this is made unavailable. Particularly considering the business they're in - publishing controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites. They would have been wise to have a backup plan for hosting.

On the other hand, if you were also passing reference to the app store duopoly (as the report mentions this), I agree with you on that. At least on Android a banned app can be fairly easily side-loaded; iOS users are entirely subject to Apple's whims on what their device is permitted to run.

That is quite the hypothetical. Given that the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems incredibly unlikely that all server companies and internet service providers would refuse their business.

In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong. For example, just look at The Pirate Bay, who have managed to stay online and operational despite years of attempts by powerful corporations and nation states to take it down.

How is it an antitrust case? Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on hosting internet services. And there is no oligopoly for this line of business, there are many thousands of suitable providers worldwide.

It would be different if, say, CenturyLink were blocking content across their transit infrastructure. That would be more like your railroad analogy.

They pretty much already did. In corporate PR terms, "it contravened our Terms of Service" is essentially synonymous with "we don't want to be associated with it".

The threshold is if the management at Amazon etc. feel that it would generate too much bad publicity and/or potential legal liability for them to provide service to an organization mired in such controversy.

Indeed, and I think it's because Parler is best known for hosting violent, far-right content, that is linked to the recent insurrection at the Capitol Building. Whereas the other services you cite are much more generic in their clientele.

So based on this, Amazon made a business decision to deny service to Parler, due to the adverse publicity (and perhaps, potential legal liability) generated for them by hosting this content.

"Antifa riots" is a somewhat vague descriptor, but may well be yes, depending on which incident or incidents you're referring to.

Are you sure you haven't heard anyone describe anti-fascist actions as terrorism? I believe Trump himself said as much, several times last year, to wide news coverage.

How is it not a counterexample? TPB has user registration, submissions and comments, and a search function. Conceptually, this isn't too different to the function of Parler.

Also, the introduction of magnet links (or more generally, the DHT which those rely on) was a broadly positive move for the BitTorrent community, reducing reliance on centralized tracker servers.

Yes you can, it just means the scalability has to be designed in without using AWS/GCP/Azure services. Just like we all used to do it.

It'll certainly be interesting to see what happens to the Republican party over the next few years, given that they've ended up tying themselves so strongly to Trump's cult of personality.

I think the issue is more that Trump, who is a highly divisive character, has become the face of the Republican party.

So people end up conflating the ostracism of Trump and those in his periphery with an attack on the Republican party.

As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states.

Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?

This does fit the definition of terrorism though: violent action, or threats of violent action, for political purposes.

I think it would be very difficult to argue that last week's invasion of the Capitol Building was neither violent nor politically motivated.

Amazon aren't the only provider of hosting services, even if they are one of the largest. It's entirely doable to shift providers, even in the face of censorship - The Pirate Bay is one long-running example of this.