I really hope you realize how the history books will record this if this all goes South. You're cheering on big tech's unchecked power to destroy a business it doesn't like in < 24 hours.
My prediction is this will only radicalise people further by giving them a persecution complex.
Country is a failed state if the policies are dictated by the terrorists that stormed the capital. Our decisions to serve who we want should not be dictated by threats of violence.
> Country is a failed state if the policies are dictated by the terrorists that stormed the capital. Our decisions <...> should not be dictated by threats of violence.
How is this relevant in Parler's case? It is not demanding any state policy changes. It is not threatening anyone with violence. It just wants to be open for business, so that its users, including Trump supporters, could talk to each other.
Amazon wants to keep their large enterprise customers happy who complained about being hosted along side a xmm on controversial site. Are you saying Amazon can’t pick and choose customers and should be forced to lose money if they get boycotted by other customers that want to be as far away from controversial sites as possible?
These people already have a persecution complex, they shouldn't be allowed to proliferate because of "what ifs." They've already shown what they can do, unchecked.
Shutting down Parler and others like them is for the greater good.
EDIT: Also, Amazon told them to moderate their content or get booted. Parler didn't do so, got booted.
I don’t know what exactly is on Parler and I don’t care. Millions of real people were using it to share their genuine ideas about how their country should be. Laugh at me all you want.
In some cases (not saying this one), in fact they do owe you.
"Four men wearing Nazi lapel pins who were refused service and evicted from a German restaurant in Torrance won a legal victory Thursday when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that their civil rights were violated."
Wow, this article was published a month before I was born! I'm not sure that particular case matters in 2021 but hey, a broken clock is right twice a day.
I don't know what you're talking about. What "payback" would they hope for? What's my side? No terrorist insurrection and madness against me and my loved ones? Quite difficult to see that play out.
Payback by way of an easy ride with the incoming administration. I was jumping to conclusions regarding what side you're on but the tone of your comment suggested left wing?
You will learn over the coming years that silencing ones critics does not make them go away or make them less angry. What you will find is that moderates, such as myself, who want a balanced view of what is actually going on will be forced to seek out information from sources which become more and more partisan and extreme in their tone.
Neither of us really wants this to happen but this is the road you currently appear willing to travel.
It's kinda sad that being against hate is considered left wing but yes, you're right. I do tend to favor ideals of the left (the right doesn't seem to be welcoming of Black men like myself).
I think we've already seen how terrible things can go when veering too far right and I'm HOPING the ones in/come into power will be mindful enough to compensate.
While I strike a positive tone with the implosion of Parler, I am not blind to what could feasible happen to other communities. I am sympathetic to the trials of the sex industry, what with Patreon and payment providers effectively cutting off their livelihoods.
A truly balanced view of the news is not happening, even with A.I. assisted processes (human bias is embedded in A.I.) but I think that's your best bet.
My fear: very real questions of antitrust are going to be litigated by a bunch of unsympathetic jokers like Parler with a flimsy case, like that guy who sued Facebook because they shut down his app that let users troll their friends photos for bikini pics.
Yes that's a great movie. Issues of speech though are a bit different than issues of anticompetitive behavior, I don't think an unsympathetic and probably incompetent litigant works as well in the latter.
Questions about who a hoster can refuse to host will always have to be asked in court by those we hate. Normal people don't normally get ban hammered. It's like how West Bro set quite a few legal standards for free speech on the sidewalks.
Good point. I guess I'd prefer anti-competitive litigation in particular to be centered on arguments among those who compete. Parler wasn't exactly in direct or indirect competition with AWS. Might be better if another cloud provider were saying 'hey these guys shut us out of a deal to maintain their market position' rather than what happened in this case.
It's more about how we should always be weary of extreme examples which can set precedence with regrettable repercussions.
If I had proposed as a thought experiment, a hypothetical "proto-fascist social media site that facilitated a failed insurrection based on outlandish conspiracies and disinformation" to argue something, most would claim it's an absurd outlier and shouldn't be used because it's not generally representative.
But here we are. That's the risk. Arguments that normally would be summarily dismissed will be taken as legitimate. This is also exactly the window of time where otherwise unacceptable laws will be accepted (like the AUMF after 9/11) It's potentially a dangerous time with long lasting effects that will be hard to claw back and we should tread lightly and carefully knowing these tendencies.
We still haven't been able to spin down the military expansionism from 80 years ago after pearl harbor for instance. These systems can take on a life of their own and become really hard to undo. Careful careful.
This is not a flimsy case. First, the courts protect speech at all costs, no matter if it is a private or public platform. Second, the actions these companies have taken are monopolistic in nature. Parler should demand billions, and not settle. I would love to be the attorney on this gig.
Are there real antitrust questions here? If you get booted from AWS, you can always go to Azure or GCP, or Digital Ocean/Linode/Rackspace/etc.
I believe there are real antitrust questions regarding Amazon but getting booted from AWS doesn’t seem to connect with any of them. Amazon does not compete with Parler.
Seems like one of the funny things about the internet is that as “free” as it seems to be sometimes, there is no part of the internet that is really a public space. Everything on the internet is owned by somebody. There are no public roads, no sidewalks, no easements on the internet. If this were about a physical space like a store, you can get banned from the store but still protest outside on the sidewalk. If AWS were a “common carrier” then it would need strong justifications for banning customers.
I don’t see any of these legal arguments playing out here.
I'd imagine the case will be flimsy for the very reasons you bring up, but may be well-lawyered if Parler's funders (Mercers) have something out for Amazon.
I'd much prefer important questions in society be brought up by the right people for the right reasons.
According to the law subreddit, Parler’s current legal representation for this suit consists of a single lawyer running a sole proprietorship. They are going to get buried in this case.
It's clear that the broader problem for Parler is that they can't go to those other hosting providers either, because nobody wants their stinky business ruining the corporate image.
Arguably that's the real boycott, not just being tossed off Amazon, but the fact that a very small number of companies have comparable infrastructure, and they're all saying no.
But how do you litigate against being sent to Coventry?
Should you be able to litigate against being sent to Coventry? If a broad swathe of society finds you so objectionable or reputationally risky that they don't want to engage with you at all, then should there even be a recourse for that?
There is really nothing stopping a "hosting for radical and extremists" cloud service from existing. In fact, it does exist, and it's named Epik. Their dedictated hosting prices look quite high to me, but that's just the free market in action.
AWS market share just isn't large enough for anybody to succeed on anti-trust grounds.
Now when they also get rejected by every other web host, or a sufficiently large fraction, it gets more interesting: are they coordinating, actively or implicitly? Or are they following the same thought process, and ending uo at the same result, independently? Does it matter?
Any supermarket can ban you for not wearing a shirt. What if they all ban you, and you just can't buy either a shirt or food?
Is the latter different, because it's about survival?
if you get thrown out of every bar in town for bad behaviour, do you have an anti-trust case against them? What if they operate a ban list, and one or two incidents are enough to cut you off?
Anyway... Parler is mouldy: both toxic and toast. And slippery slope is a fallacy. So this is really all upside, as far as I can tell.
They're still not going to able to prove anti-trust. If we start from the idea that the internet is a vital service, the problem very much becomes at what point is somebody compelled to host you on their infrastructure?
Providers will quite rightly claim a right to compensation for reputational damage. If I have to provide service to Parler, I want it known that this is not my choice, for example.
The most case I could see them actually having would be if IANA refused to allow them to be listed in the root zone DNS servers, and if basic connectivity were being denied - because that's the very basics of internet connectivity. Everything else is just making things easier, but it's all being done because someone else wants to do it.
Freedom of association then becomes a significant issue because hate speech is not a protected class.
Why are you fearful? When the courts uphold rights for even the least sympathetic people, it demonstrates the strength of our laws and the commitment to principle -- see ACLU in Skokie. What should scare you is when laws are selectively applied based on the people you like vs the people you don't like... kind of the whole reasoning behind BLM.
I will be shocked if this doesn't have multiple test cases. Hosters have been choosing which kind of content they will host for decades with porn being the largest theme that is banned on many hosts. AWS pulling them from their servers is for me the least controversial of all the things that have happened.
except for the timing (immediately post-Georgia runoff), the sudden reversal in policy, the possible appearance of collusion or antitrust violation (something else the courts will likely decide), Amazon's responses to similar speech on other hosted customer sites, and of course, what's actually written in the contract between the two companies. Not saying Parler has a valid case, but there are plenty of issues to sort through, it's not as cut-and-dry as you seem to think.
One of the complaints argues "...requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service". There may be exclusions or other terms which override the 30-days, if so, surely that will come out during discovery or via Amazon's response.
1) Parler provided no evidence that AWS colluded with Twitter, Facebook or anyone else. And they have banned plenty of people in the past without needing advice or permission from a third party.
2) AWS has a market share in "cloud" of 32% where there is a vibrant array of competitors e.g. Alibaba, Azure, DigitalOcean, GCP, Oracle, IBM, Tencent etc. And in the broader hosting space their share is likely to be in the single digits. Any notion of an antitrust violation seems baseless.
Those might be valid defenses, ultimately it appears a court will decide. As far as #1, one might potentially argue that the evidence is the banning of Parler by Apple and Google's app stores, plus revocations from Stripe, Twilio and others, all within 48 hours. Further, it also coincided with Twitter (a much larger AWS customer) banning Donald Trump. #2 is probably not so simple either, as Google (i.e. GCP) was one of the participants in the ban, and a bunch of those other companies aren't US-based. It's why we have courts and juries.
Going with this comment and the idea that only the courts can decide if content is illegal. The idea that a hoster can't take down a child porn website because they haven't been to court is completely outragous. There are things that we clearly know to be illegal and we don't need the courts to tell us.
The legality of stuff is something the is judged in a court of law against the laws emitted by the representatives of the people.
From this things get complicated. Some stuff is obviously illegal and people know it. And other stuff some people agree with and others don't.
What do you think happens when a public corporation takes the role of a judge and sides with either party? Where is the legality of this?
Since you mention children. WTF is going on in USA with the gender changes on children? This should be considered child abuse and parents should be stripped from their rights. Or is this not on par with child pornography?
> except for the timing (immediately post-Georgia runoff)
Seems to me that the timing was after a seditious mob tried to mount an insurrection against the elected government while they were trying to fulfill their constitutional duties. Like it or not, that's not something any major corporation wants to be associated with.
There may be exclusions or other terms which override the 30-days
There are. From what I can see, section 7.2.b.ii.A via 6.1.b and 8.2.c (violation of the Acceptable Use Policy due to harmful or offensive content) or possibly even 6.1.a.i (security risk to third party) of the AWS Customer Agreement could apply.
According to the Amazon letter, over the "past several weeks", Parler was asked to remove 98 posts by AWS, which they allegedly did not do in a timely manner. Parler claims that's a misrepresentation, because they removed everything they were asked to "over the last few days".
They argue they moderate as much as needed (in their opinion). So they say, why twitter is OK? It becomes discriminating incident and not just "Per Policy" incident
I refuse to believe they've got banned because of the lack of user management features. In fact, the existence of very crazy people on the platform shouldn't be a platform problem, you can always let know authorities about any danger, report and ban users. If we apply the same rules for everyone, Amazon and Apple should be banning Twitter too, because you can see dozens of messages everyday of people death threatening others, in fact, you can still read old messages of politics inciting rioting, reporters doxxing other reporters, etc. and nothing happened since.
If you see something objectionable on Twitter, report it. It will be addressed. The problem that Amazon has with Parler is that they repeatedly informed them about specific posts with violent content and Parler didn't remove them.
The difference is that Twitter and Facebook make a real effort to police violent or otherwise dangerous communications on their platforms. Parler was literally created as a safe haven for stuff that gets you banned on other platforms.
For a company based in the most racism-sensitive part of the Western world, they do not seem to care as much for non-American instances thereof. Their response in Myanmar was far from adequate. They took down a few accounts after a few months and that was that.
Zuckerberg was famously calling Twitter's decision to narrate Trump tweets with factcheck warnings 'wrong' just some months ago. It's little do do with geography, and everything to do with their former position becoming politically untenable.
Let's be honest, the difference here is that one happened in America and the other in a country far from America with nobody powerful enough to defend the population being killed.
If some big government would have threaten FB if they did not deal with the rohingya genocide, FB would have try to show that they care. But nobody big enough did so FB can just do nothing.
That is not factual. You still can see how they bypass some content, so it's really biased content policing. I don't like that. They're not applying the same rules and claiming they're doing the effort and Parler or other aren't is not a good argument.
Most likely explanation is that Amazon simply doesn't want problems with the party that controls the whole government now, and was threatening to split them up. So banning parler was essentially a form of lobbying.
How do you know they didn't? Is it because you could read a post and wasn't banned in time? That happens all the time in Twitter. In addition, you can read old tweets who are the same.
Intention matters, as does scale. Cars kill far more people than serial killers, yet any sane person prefers the company of car dealers to serial killers. This is so obvious, it's stretching my ability to feign an assumption of good faith.
The authorities in this case would be the Department of Justice, which until January 20th still reports to Donald Trump.
If tech companies shut down services that are actively supporting an existential threat to the US as a constitutional republic, it seems to me that it's their clear moral and ethical duty to stop providing service to those threats if at all possible.
Furthermore, at this point it's clearly in their self interest to break all ties with Parler, since they open themselves to liability if Parler organizes another successful terrorist attack, now that they know that such activities are being organized there.
If anything, I would argue that they should have policed that content in a much more opinionated fashion far sooner. It's only because things have escalated to the point of violence that it's now so controversial.
Let me give an example to illustrate - suppose that Al Queda, or ISIS, or some other terrorist organization was using AWS or GCP. Would it be so controversial to refuse service to those organizations then? At the very least I don't see why as private businesses they couldn't decide that serving such organizations is too much risk to take on.
I think they have a case here, proving parler is exclusively for violence is massive overreach. However, in this political climate they may not get a fair trial.
I'm wondering why nobody talks about the recently arrested BLM activist who was armed and in the crowd in Capitol hill seen encouraging people to commit violence and destroy property property.
It claimed Parler was exclusively used for violence, the burden of proof is on them.
All Parler's lawyer need to do is show them the exact same vitrol on Twitter to highlight how shaky Amazon's argument is.
I don't expect a fair trial free from political furor going on right now. It's amazingly easy to manipulate the crowd when they are too tired to be objective from the information overload. 1984 might as well been the Les Prophéties of 21st century.
> It claimed Parler was exclusively used for violence
This is completely false.
> In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.
> “Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”
I am not an English major, but from a reading of those two paragraphs, it does not seem to me that AWS has claimed that Parler is solely used for violence.
It sounds like we have agreed that it never claimed Parker is solely used for violence.
And, no, that's also not a claim it has made. They are just an arbiter of their TOS.
Your understanding of this situation seems to be defined by how you want the facts of the case to be, rather than what the actual facts of the case are.
Google BLM activist capitol hill his mugshot is there. He claims he was an independent journalist but are we just taking peoples word at face value now?
Wow. Within minutes my comment was flagged for simply reporting what I read from mainstream media.
I get that HN has a strong political bias but outright censorship of facts that threatens your narrative only hurts the rest of us with centrist views.
I want Trump gone too, but we cannot get swept up by emotions because it has no place in the judicial system, or at least if shouldn't but that may be a tall order.
According to the article, someone identifying with the BLM movement was present in the mob that attacked capitol hill. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe that this person is some kind of agent provocateur. I did not find any report that he claimed to be a journalist, independent or otherwise.
In any significant protest, mob, or riot there is going to be a mix of different people with different agendas. The idea that somehow the capitol hill mob was caused by agent provocateurs is… well, entirely possible but it doesn’t absolve anyone who participated of responsibility for their actions.
White nationalists and hate groups like the proud boys show up at BLM protests. Why would it be odd that BLM shows up in the mob that attacked Capitol Hill?
BLM, like most civil rights movements, is loosely organized and generally not playing 4D chess. Same applies to hate groups / white nationalist movements, in general. If there’s anything suspicious going on, it’s probably Parler. Seems like Parler was half agitprop and half honeypot. But I’d be willing to believe that this was incompetence & opportunism, since it seems like there’s plenty of incompetence and cut corners to go around. Rich people always fantasize about controlling the media but don’t realize how expensive it is to actually succeed at it, and Parler reads like a 21st century version of a rich family buying a newspaper to try and influence national politics (except it turns out, this is harder than they thought).
My guess is that the conversation with Parler's law firm went something like this.
Parler CEO: "AWS terminated our services. I want you to sue them for violation of antitrust laws!"
Established Lawyer or Firm: "AWS had rights to terminate this contract for $reasons and their contract specifies binding arbitration. You have no case and if you pursue this we decline to represent you."
Parler CEO: "You're canceling us! I'll find another firm!"
You can always find a single proprietorship to file anything but a respectable firm or lawyer will decline cases like this.
To people that invest into the cloud ecosystems, do you not use one of those agnostic frameworks (educate me) so you can easily drop your stack onto azure or anywhere else?
What if you want to shift it all off the cloud, can you still mimic the infrastructure on a vps? I thought that’s what stuff like serverless allowed?
Feels like this something we should be able to do, no? All this talk about WASM to make portable code, but Parler cannot even just move their shit to another server?
There has to be a abstract layer that lets you leverage anything with a unified api across aws/google/azure/etc. Why in god’s name are we directly tying our shit to one provider?
These abstractions come at a price that a startup may not have wanted to pay. The cloud providers are also constantly pulling you into their specific solutions. Even if they kept it pretty neutral, if you've never deployed to the other cloud, it will likely still constitute a non-trivial amount of effort. I think I've seen a screenshot somewhere of Parler saying they'd be back in a week or so. Maybe that's fake, maybe that's them doing the work to deploy to the other cloud, maybe that's the time they expect they need for ligation, maybe it's all horses at once. Also, what at this point are their chances of the next provider to kick them out too?
I feel like if we had the abstract layer that people leverage with the worst case fallback being any random vps provider, we should be ok. The worst case fallback won’t give you the as-needed pay as you go infrastructure, but your code won’t need to change.
Do frameworks like this not exist at all?
Look, if 4chan can be hosted somewhere, your site can be hosted somewhere lol. No need to cry and sue Amazon, this should be solved at the tech level.
4chan dealt with every scenario under the sun, and they made the adjustments and is still here, and no one is able to take it down. We cannot sit here and act like it can’t be done because the Titans are preventing it. It’s just not true, we have to simply get better about this. No excuses.
In retrospect they may wish they'd prioritized a multi-cloud strategy, but you can only spend each Engineering dollar once, right? Moving things to another server is not the problem. Moving a constellation of things around, more so. It's hard to configure resources in the cloud providers in an agnostic way. Something like Terraform gives you a unified language, but the specific code is still going to be different for each.
I didn't follow the 4chan thing well, but weren't they also down for a while? Edit: my bad, that was 8chan, who went offline for three months in 2019, as per Wikipedia.
I'm glad to see this playing out, not because of the people involved, but because of the issues at stake.
Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over what we can say and who we're able to associate with. In one concerted ban action, you can be cut off from most of your friends and the ability to express yourself in any forums that have more than a tiny reach. After being banned from the big three, you are now excluded from pretty much everything your friends do and say, and your chances in any political field are essentially zero. You even lose the ability to use many services that require the big three for authentication or verification.
Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable. And yet here we are with the modern equivalent.
These companies have subsumed a not insignificant amount of power that was until now only within the purview of governments, with that power presumably subject to the will of the people and democratic ideals of free speech. You still weren't allowed to incite violence with your speech, for example, but investigation of that kind of behavior was the job of the police, and punishment the job of the justice system. And the bar was pretty high before censoring someone, as it should be in a non-totalitarian state.
These lawsuits need to happen because we NEED to delineate where responsibilities lay in terms of protecting our rights as free citizens. And that always starts with the most despised of society because they're almost always the ones to trigger these questions.
‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’
It's interesting how tech people will endlessly argue about some minor details regarding privacy in some mediocre-usage phone app but huge precedents like these are swallowed without criticism because of political stances.
From a point of view outside US, it seems to me that this is the consequence of the extreme polarization of the political situation in the US that happened in the last 8-6 years and brought what looks like a moral witch-hunt from both sides.
Now, if the consequence is to strike a point against the enemy party, it seems both formations unconsciously agree to sacrifice some piece of democracy or freedom. In the end everybody lose and society decays.
Exactly so. It's easy to argue against Trumpistas being a net negative to society on almost any level.
It's much less easy to think about ways to negate them as a political force without hurting everyone else in the process, and it seems a lot of people don't even care about weighing costs and benefits.
Unfortunately, when the modern political sphere is highly influenced by idiots on Twitter who are permanently stuck on first-level thinking, this is what you get.
> Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable. And yet here we are with the modern equivalent.
Is it really the modern equivalent? People are not getting banned here over what they say in Twitter DMs. They are getting banned over what they publish on their timelines.
You have a right to free speech, not a right to free publication. If you want to publish your opinions you will have to pay for that yourself if you can't find anyone willing to pay the costs for you.
I will defend your right to say what you want, but I won't buy you a printing press.
This is probably a case where the amount charged didn’t represent the true cost to Amazon, however.
There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless. It's much simpler to just not do business with them than it is to try and develop a pricing model that accounts for those things.
The problem with your statement is that it is subjective. Amazon removing Parler hurt them from my subjective view a lot more than hosting them. I will never host anything on AWS since I know I could get removed at any time because of political reasons.
I am sure Amazon hosts a lot of sites that I don't agree with but that doesn't mean I will hold them accountable. It is simply stupid.
If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did (at least if you compare equal shitty places like Twitter), hold Parler accountable and not Amazon for hosting them.
> There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless.
What negative publicity do you mean if not political ones from one specific point of view? For me, parler did nothing other than offer an alternative to twitter which is equal shitty.
Amazon didn't have any publicity regarding this matter until they decided, together with a lot of other megacorps to remove everything associated with parler. Now they have had a lot of publicity, which is in my view very negative since now everyone knows that if you want to host anything that support any other viewpoint than those held by american megacorps you can be removed.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone can think this is good publicity.
At no point did I express agreement with any of these things. That is what you seem to be finding in my speech that's not there. I thought explicitly clarifying might help.
Trying to read into more than what's written and using that as a basis to tell me to "be smarter" is unnecessarily rude.
My mistake for opening up a vaguely political thread on HN, I'm out.
> It just doesn't make sense, unless you believe Parler is bad in some kind of way and the only way they could've been bad is political.
Not the previous commenter, but Parler absolutely did commit wrongdoing, and that wrongdoing was absolutely not political. Calls for murder and violent insurrection are not political statements!
>I will never host anything on AWS since I know I could get removed at any time because of political reasons.
>If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did
Political reasons?!
They didn't do anything wrong?!
Parler was knowingly and willingly hosting content that was glorifying and inciting actual physical, deadly violence. Calls to skin politicians and their families are okay with you?!
Nowhere that I know of protected that kind of thing as free expression.
It's not political speech. It left the realm of political speech a long time ago.
Risks of reputation damage cannot be allowed to override contract law. Instead, they should be able to just point to the contract and tell the deplatforming mob that they have to abide by it.
Otherwise, no contract will be worth the paper it is written on if a mob can just scream on Twitter and get a perfectly legal site taken down on very short notice. I'd be very hesitant to sign a contract with any company that doesn't include extremely high termination fees that would be sufficient to find a new host.
That's completely irrelevant to what the issue here is though. AWS, as a private enterprise, is under no duty to sell its services to anybody.
AWS works on a consumption model, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the customer also have reservations with AWS for resources covering at least the next few months. Whether AWS can terminate the supply of services depend entirely on the service agreement. IIRC, AWS has a number of options of terminating a user's services in its service agreement, such as abuse of service, which hosting content inciting seditious violence most likely falls under.
> AWS, as a private enterprise, is under no duty to sell its services to anybody.
This may well be the legal position, but I think people are wondering whether it should be this way.
The first electricity providers were (I think, mostly) likewise completely private & free to sell or not as they pleased. But as they grew, and our dependence on their product grew, the rules changed. They are now regulated differently, and have to sell to all who pay their bills. And nobody thinks it a stain on ConEd's reputation when they are found to have been selling power to porn-studios or gun-makers (i.e. legal activities some find distasteful), nor to weed-growers or mafia-run warehouses (illegal activities, but we don't expect ConEd to hire deeply investigate every connection).
Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses? Or something more like a cable TV service, where they bear some responsibility for what's communicated in the channels being provided?
It is always good to recall history. The origin of antitrust laws lies in the late 19th century, when a lot of railroad companies consolidated into a few mammoths. Back then, there were basically no regulations around the use of railroads, which were built by private capital.
Nevertheless, railroads became an important infrastructure of the nation, and the convergence of power towards just a few hands meant that the situation became untenable.
That's antitrust or competition law. However, no matter how you slice it, court would be unlikely to rule AWS as a monopoly given its market share in cloud hosting and even if you focus in on specific services, AWS market share is small by antitrust standards.
Amazon (the webstore) on the other hand is getting close, and with the core business of the other FAANGs.
Antitrust laws can be also broken by collusion. If, for example, AWS, Azure and Google can be demonstrated to act as a cartel (IDK if this is true, but if...), then they violate antitrust law, because in combination, they dominate the market.
>Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses?
This is what I find so disturbing about the Parler fiasco. Every tech person I know has interacted with AWS directly at some point. Everyone any of us knows has interacted with something reliant on AWS. What's the percentage of web services that run on AWS now? It's well over a third IIRC. AWS is essentially indispensable at this point. It might very well be called a technological utility.
Moreover AWS's core market has, historically, been startups. Parler, being a startup, was in their core group of customers, dealing with a service that had effectively become ubiquitous among startups. They were an American company, with a CEO and investors and users and capital.
Being a B2B service, bordering on a technological utility, rather than a B2C online community like Facebook or Twitter, the idea of AWS banning users seems almost a category error. The idea of AWS banning an American startup would have been unthinkable to me before it happened.
I think the argument in such cases is that making a custom cake celebrating something is (in part) an artistic creation, a kind of speech, and (you can argue) should not be compelled.
Whereas a grocery store refusing to sell things off the shelf to some group of people would be a very different matter.
(To be clear, I'm not taking any position on the particular cake case linked. There are many & details differ.)
Additionally, there is a large and highly competitive market for baking cakes, so you can just drive down the street. With enough cake shops, someone's almost certainly going to take your order.
The law currently only protects against certain types of discrimination, but high competition protects against all of them (assuming there isn't collusion).
In terms of the printing press analogy, they were renting printing presses that Amazon owned (because setting up printing presses is expensive). And Amazon said "you're printing too many 'kill all the redheads' flyers, so we're not renting to you anymore". (The printing analogy does break down if Parler also ends up being denied renting physical space in a datacenter.)
"We have a clause in your contract that says you shouldnt print 'kill all the x' and you're letting just about anyone print those. We can still rent you servers if you put a content-filtering team into effect"
If coup is what he really have done then he should sit on his trial, right? This is very heavy offense, judges should decide and if they rule him guilty he should go to jail. It's judges who should decide if he is guilty or not, not AWS or Twitter.
As I understand those who were involved in any crime are going to be chased and put in front of the judge.
AWS can decide whether they want to do business with fascists just like bakeries can decide whether they can sell cakes to gay folks. What’s so hard about this ? May be they should not attempted coup if they wanted to set up their Dynamo DB
In country where I live it is prohibited by law to promote fascism. So I think you are not right by saying company can do business with fascists (i.e. to promote fascism) if they like so. Such company would be dragged to court and owners would probably go to jail.
> bakeries can decide whether they can sell cakes to gay folks. What’s so hard about this ?
I had to look this up and it took a while to find the answer. There is no clear decision to say whether bakeries can reuse to sell cakes to gay people.
Sorry but what does this have to do with anything that I said? I was not trying to make any such distinction between those two acts.
I was simply saying that it's not so clear cut as to whether a baker can refuse service to anyone and they please. The Supreme Court ruled that Colorado was biased against the defendant, not that their anti-discrimination law was illegal.
Since when has Amazon became a preventer of coups? Or in charge of policing what data someone's S3 buckets hold?
GP comment is right - they could have given a 30d notice but instead they went for a kill (coordinated with others (FB, TW) to purge at the same time and for maximum damage to service, data security and reputation of their customer)
You can get ban over what you say in Twitter DM. Using your DM to harass someone is a bannable offence for example, and it should.
I think it is perfectly normal that community want to have a certain quality and moderate for this reason. Are we going to complain that HN ban trolls because it impede on their "free-speech" ? Or spammer ?
The case of Amazon is different though. If you have a contract with a company and the company terminate the contract with no valid reason, you should sue. It is their right to break the contract because they don't want to deal with you, but then they have to pay a fine because they were engaged in a contract with you and they broke it.
> It is their right to break the contract because they don't want to deal with you, but then they have to pay a fine because they were engaged in a contract with you and they broke it.
Yes absolutely. The catch being that most company include a catch-all termination condition where they can terminate the contract whenever they want. It is then the justice who has to step in and say if those condition are valid or not.
If my memory is correct, those kind of catch-all terms where deemed non-applicable in the EU, but it doesn't prevent company from still putting them in the hope that you won't sue them afterward.
Sure, and I don't believe anybody got banned from expressing their opinion over DMs. But if your DMs include threat, pushing for insurrection, pushing for violent action, etc, you will still be in violation of most website TOS.
Like their intention is to really moderate things honestly lol. They know exactly how manipulative they are being, they want to control thought, hence the urgency of not questioning it.
Utilities like the phone company are granted special privileges under the law, in exchange for society granting them those special privileges they must service all persons in their service area provided they pay the bill (and in some cases even if they do not)
Now lets look at social media and other platform, we as a society have granted them special provisions under the law, the most well known today is Section 230 but there are others. I do not believe it is unreasonable then to demand these platform be require to allow all persons to speak provided their speech is legal speech.
This is standard would be massively more open than the current moderation standards of the platforms today
Now each one of the platforms are free to fore go those special legal provisions, and be treated as publishers, like say a NYTimes, or a DailyWire publication. Under those rules then they have full and complete editorial control over everything on their site but they also assume more legal liability.
What the platforms today want is a little bit of A, and a little bit of B, I think that is not what we as a society should allow
They need to choose, are they platforms or publishers
Yes I have read that many times, and I regret to inform you that you have been terribly misled about section 230 further in no way does your link refute my position at all.
Not only is TechDirt take factually incorrect on the history of Section 230, I am talking about REFORMS to Section 230 to make it CLEAR what the section should mean, which IMO should be legal speech, not simply allow the platforms to set their own moderation standards
The Ninth Circuit has as stated the intent of Section 230 was "Congress wanted to encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet, and to promote the development of e-commerce"
The clear purpose of section 230 is promote not impede free speech. TechDirt on the whole has taken very pro-censorship stances provided it is "mah private companies" doing the censorship
This is not inline with the actual facts of law, nor it is inline with how we as a society should be progressing
I know it may come as a shock but people can have differing opinions from TechDirt....
You can definitely have different opinions on what you think the law should say, but you're misrepresenting what section 230 is for.
I can't find that Ninth Circuit rulling you're referring to. The closest I can find is Barnes v. Yahoo! where the court ruled a company can't be compelled under the CDA to ban someone. In that ruling the Ninth circuit said that congress wanted to “promote the free exchange of information and ideas over the Internet and to encourage voluntary monitoring for offensive or obscene material.”.
I can't find a ruling that says the intention of section 230 was to enforce unfettered free speech. Rather as I understand it section 230 is there to protect companies who want to publish a myriad of opinions by clarifying that it is the user who is liable for what they say, not the company that runs the website
>>I can't find that Ninth Circuit rulling you're referring to.
Batzel v. Smith [1][2]
>>Rather as I understand it section 230 is there to protect companies who want to publish a myriad of opinions by clarifying that it is the user who is liable for what they say, not the company that runs the website
The 2 congressmen that created the law are on record talking about how they did not want speech on the internet to be stifled because of legal liabilities if they moderated some content, the primary justification/rhetoric at the time like most laws designed to allow censorship/moderation was "think of the children, children might see some boobs or franks and be scared for life"
"The broad language of Section 230’s protection reflects the intent to protect the industry and its users’ ability to communicate freely." [1]
It was not conceived at the time of the Sections passage the internet companies would start to bann their "users" or "customers" from the service for political speech, such a thing was really unheard of during that time in American History, it just was not done.
Times have changed, the law needs to be updated to reflect the original intent of the law which was and is to expand not limit speech
> Times have changed, the law needs to be updated to reflect the original intent of the law which was and is to expand not limit speech
Section 230 is not limiting speech, these companies would've had the right to delete people's posts and ban users with or without section 230.
The intent was to encourage free speech by telling companies: "Don't worry, you won't be held liable for posts from your users, but you do have a responsibility to moderate". Which you can argue they weren't liable for in the first place, because they only provided the platform not the speech.
You can definitely argue for an expansion of section 230 into a new "opinion neutrality" law, but it is not the true intent of section 230 that you make it out to be.
Forgive me, the focus you put on 'platforms v publishers' is reminiscent of the uninformed section 230 discussions happening everywhere right now, which are exhausting.
Afaict section 230 isn't a special provision granted by society, it is a legal clarification of existing rights of speech & assembly that has the effect of limiting certain types of frivolous lawsuits. Clarifications seem materially different than government granting a corporation a local monopoly. The latter should definitely have strings attached, but the former?
Now you could argue that the basis for the decision to grant utilities local monopolies is rooted in similar natural monopoly circumstances (economies of scale and resource limitations) as that of mainstream social networks (physical infra & space in former, network effects in latter), and I'd probably agree, but that would be an entirely different focus than section 230 reform.
You're also advocating for a very black & white solution (platform v publisher, based on a choice about moderation), but there's a lot of specifics lacking such that its hard to determine if that's even a good idea. My immediate reaction is: online communities are extremely varied in both operation and medium (design, algorithms, what 'speech' even is, etc), and anyone who has had the experience of building and operating communities would see 'all legal speech should be published' as frankly a laughable premise. It raises far more questions than it answers, and likely just kicks the hard work of how products are designed over to lawyers who will definitely get it wrong.
My hunch is we're barking up the wrong tree with 230, and the underlying issue is too much power concentrated in too few entities. They have too much control over too many people's experiences, and when they use that power people confuse it with censorship. If we focused on the issue of natural monopolies arising from network effects, we might come to very different solutions, like decentralization with standard protocols for social graph interoperability.
>>My hunch is we're barking up the wrong tree with 230, and the underlying issue is too much power concentrated in too few entities.
I tend to agree there, my focus on 230 is simply because that seems to be only avenue open for reform at the moment, it is not the best tool to solve the problem, but it is a tool
Ultimately I think the root of the problem comes down to 2 flaws in the foundation of the legal system
1. Data ownership: We have incorrectly applied ownership rights to the companies that collect the data, instead of allowing people to own the data about themselves. This has had wide ramifications on how social media companies have been formed and monetized, as well as in criminal law
2. Failing in contract law to properly designate the current slate of "Terms of Service" and "Acceptable Use" agreements as Unconscionable Contracts, these contracts are soo one-sided that if put in to use for anything other then "Information services" they would be tossed out of court and be unenforceable. Companies should be required to have better, enforceable agreements with their users, that provide CLEAR and OBJECTIVE statement on what the service can be used for, that the process for ending the relationship is, and what the recourse is for the customer (i.e appeal, data portability, etc). Today they have none of that, and are so steeped in self serving legal verbiage with absolutely zero considerations for the user, this type of contract / agreement should not be allowed in a fair and just legal system.
it's not "freedom of speech vs publication". If it was about distribution-rights on small vs big, it would be "freedom to whisper", not "speech" which implies speaking publicly.
Another concern: by your logic, net neutrality should be moot. Let ISPs choose and throttle online service by their whim.
Anyway,"freedom of speech" is actually intended to prevent any dictatorial entity from hiding the other side from the public.
imho, If the 'democrats' are actually 'democratic', they should have solved this with a much more elegant solution - eg. inviting people to a common, shared platform and refuting them there. Current FB/twitter/aws solutions are rather 'easy but dictatorial and may backfire', which is somewhat 'republican' in taste...
(* by backfire:
pro-trumps can think: "The other side is trying to snuff us. What are they hiding? Are they more evil than imaginable? We should do something to guard USA from them"
imho, the root of the whole fiasco is actually the press preventing the broadcast of Trump after the election. (the 'snuffing')
Better solution would be having open discussions to refute the pro-trump people.
Another thing is that by-standers will note about how 'undemocratic' the whole solution is, and whether they'll also be treated if they end up being the 'other' side of other issues
I never said publication wasn't protected under free speech. If the government pressures twitter to ban your account, that's censorship and a violation of freedom of speech.
My argument was that your right to freedom of speech does not compel others to publish your speech.
If you send me an e-mail with your opinion and the instruction to forward it to all my contacts, then I am not violating your freedom of speech by refusing to do so.
And yes, freedom of speech does not protect net neutrality. That's why we need the FCC to set those rules and enforce them.
What some people are arguing for is a sort of "opinion neutrality" for social media companies that forces them to treat all opinions equally without moderation.
You can certainly debate the pros and cons of such a rule, but it's not a consequence of your right to freedom of speech.
once again, same here: to maintain democracy, no political entity should be able to snuff the other side.
By your logic, it's OK for Bill Gates to buy all the press influence to completely silence the politically-other-side.
And my mention of net neutrality is to show how flawed your whole logic process is.
> What some people are arguing for is a sort of "opinion neutrality" for social media companies that forces them to treat all opinions equally without moderation.
hm I actually find this scary. Maybe you're from China, where deviant opinions/minorities must be snuffed down for "harmonious society"?
> By your logic, it's OK for Bill Gates to buy all the press influence to completely silence the politically-other-side.
That is not OK, for the very simple reason you shouldn't be allowed to monopolize the media or any industry for that matter. The way you protect free speech is by not allowing any company to become so large and powerful that it rivals governments and can enact censorship.
> And my mention of net neutrality is to show how flawed your whole logic process is.
I don't see how that points out a flaw? I just explained that net neutrality is not protected under freedom of speech, so I don't see its relevance.
> hm I actually find this scary. Maybe you're from China, where deviant opinions/minorities must be snuffed down for "harmonious society"?
Thank you for keeping the discussion respectful. I don't think opinions should be snuffed out, but I also think you shouldn't be forced by the government to publish lies. I worry that if governments can force companies to publish all opinions including the ones they don't agree with, then they can also force them to publish propaganda.
> I worry that if governments can force companies to publish all opinions including the ones they don't agree with, then they can also force them to publish propaganda.
> Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over what we can say and who we're able to associate with
Yeah, no. Any time before the internet, getting any sort of publicity was a thousand times harder with lots of very real gatekeepers.
Include anyone but white/male/hetero/christian/upper-middle-class-or-better people in your consideration, and the idea that freedom of speech went anywhere but up, almost vertically, in the last decade or two is laughable.
Not really. This is like a monopoly on paper. Sure, you can build your own press, but what are you going to use it for if you can't get paper to print on?
Maybe freedom of speech went up, vertically, meaning more people can publish than ever before, but it got extremely narrow at the same time. If you publish the wrong thought your life or business can be literally destroyed within a day. (or as long as it takes to fly to Africa)
Parler would have never been a business. Because, for some reason, those gatekeepers weren't entirely terrible in keeping really obvious and obnoxious assholes far away from their printing presses.
And let's be clear: nobody gets "literally destroyed", nor even figuratively, for publishing "one wrong thought". Parler had been peddling in low-effort violence-porn for the lowlifes that make up their userbase for what.. two years? That's hundreds of thousands of terrible... "thoughts". And nothing happened, until something happened, which happened to be peoples' deaths and a crisis of democracy.
For comparison: reddit got into hot water at some point, and managed to clean up their act. The porn websites are in a similar process. It's all just actions-have-consequences, really. And the public's ire is actually the more nuanced, soft approach to do it, compared to the blunt tool of criminal law.
We need an internet sidewalk. An internet post office. An internet common carrier.
I'm afraid it isn't going to swing that way. We're closer to allowing utility companies to cut people off arbitrarily than we are to forcing internet companies to keep serving users who hurt their business.
And what do you do when someone dumps a truck of garbage on that sidewalk? We already have that sidewalk. Everyone connected to internet has a small sidewalk. Not everyone wants to tread in all neighbourhoods, and some streets are not wide enough to allow half of the world walking them, but they have that sidewalk.
They're prosecuted by the law, just like real illegal dumpers. That's my position, that there should be a public internet content distribution platform that operates at-cost services for users and whose only rules are the laws of the United States. An internet utility.
You have those already, facebook operates according to US laws. If not, it will be prosecuted. Of course, maybe government mandated ones will be better? Like public television in my country, where it is just a propaganda machine for currently ruling party? You think it will not be "moderated" by ruling party in US when operated as a public government owned utility?
Facebook has many more rules about what content can and cannot be posted than the law requires. A public utility wouldn't even need a Terms of Service page.
> Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable. And yet here we are with the modern equivalent.
Right, there will likely be a licensing regime that comes out of this which does tie user-generated content platforms to the state, reducing their ability to make arbitrary decisions.
> Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over
there was a monopoly on phone service in the 70s that exceeds the monopoly on cloud hosting today. and it wasn't a cabal; it was a single company.
> Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over
> something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable. And yet here we are
> with the modern equivalent.
they aren't shutting off the phone service. they still have internet, and can publish anthing they want anywhere else.
what they shut off is their television show / public feed of people calling for violence. it's completely justified.
> there was a monopoly on phone service in the 70s that exceeds the monopoly on cloud hosting today
Yes, and as part of that _regulated_ monopoly, they were required to provide "universal" service: it didn't matter how remote the customer was or how inconvenient it would be to provide them with service, telephone service had to be provided to anyone who was willing to pay the (regulated) monthly fee.
Did you read the article or the lawsuit? They make zero free speech claims in the lawsuit. They are making a Sherman anti-trust argument that Twitter and Amazon are colluding because Twitter is scared of competition from Parler. This lawsuit won’t go anywhere.
> Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over what we can say
Not really.
Like many others I was born without Internet and never before in history so many people said so many things, multiple times a day, from anywhere they are, to a potentially global audience, paying nothing
Premise: I agree that letting public speak happen on private channels handled by some of the largest global corporations in history is dangerous, but in this case AWS is not a free service, it's paid and not really cheap.
Yeah this whole sentiment kinda strikes me as nonsense.
Never before in history has each individual had the ability to broadcast their thoughts so widely so easily.
Twitter/Facebook/AWS/etc can all refuse to do business with you. You can still throw an old computer in your basement and plug it into the internet and make your thoughts accessible to the entire world.
Domain name registrar or TLD banned you too?
Great, pick another registrar. Pick another TLD. Pick another country with different laws. You can do it all from the country you currently inhabit and the comfort of your office chair. You can make your site accessible via IP address or virtually unblockable via Tor.
Even if you're violating the laws and norms of the country you inhabit, you can host this in a way that's virtually untraceable back to you with little effort.
How exactly did one accomplish that in 1930? 1830? 1730? 1630?
What ability did a peasant in 830AD have to broadcast their thoughts across the entire world that we lack today?
If you made death threats from your telephone to the point your neighbors threatened to discontinue their phone service because of the unwanted negative attention. The phone service would cut you off.
No company should be forced to lose money. That’s what we are asking Amazon to do. They were going to lose customers if they kept hosting Parler.
I don't think that's how your situation would play out. The neighbors would complain, and police would get involved. Then you would get prosecuted for making violent threats.
That’s what you think would happen. Lin wood had a call to execute pence up for over a week. Not till apple threatened to remove Parler from the store was it deleted.
Policing is out, we talking about the same people who failed to activate the national guard allowing the siege of our capital.
I'm saying that Amazon is neither the police nor a judge.
As a public company, their terms of service are as questionable as EULAs that no-one reads. I don't think (know) if they were ever tested in court. But it's about time they do.
Impartial justice? That would be great. Preferably without having to have a huge demonstration to get people who killed someone else on video prosecuted.
I'm not sure what do you mean, where I live there are cases of people who had been prosecuted without valid reason and was sentenced to years in jail. Such situations are awful since innocent human being was put through suffering and by the system which should protect innocent people. But this is not rule that governs juridical system, people do make mistakes - you cannot judge whole system by mistake made by random Joe, no system would stand such test. I prefer to be judged by state judge than by angry crowd or self appointed police. Mainly because even state judge and police are accountable for their actions, whereas crowd or self appointed guards may be difficult to find after actions are done.
> Lin wood had a call to execute pence up for over a week. Not till apple threatened to remove Parler from the store was it deleted.
I don't think it should have been deleted at all. Let concerned citizens sue Lin wood (whoever that is) and present his threat as evidence. Why should we expect people's words to be deleted from a public platform?
If nobody sued him, or went to the police, maybe it wasn't a real threat. Or maybe it wasn't illegal. Who are we to judge? Let the "neighbors" take it to the police and to the courts.
I really wish today's social platforms functioned like Slashdot. Their philosophy was to never delete anything posted by users, unless compelled by a court of law. That's the right thing to do.
Would they? Your neighbors might be able to get a court order blocking you from calling them, or get you arrested for sufficiently graphic threats.
But I thought phone companies had obligations of universal service (in most places), so that they are not free to cut people off based on rumors & internal committees.
> If you made death threats from your telephone to the point your neighbors threatened to discontinue their phone service because of the unwanted negative attention. The phone service would cut you off.
Not really, you would have police visiting you, probably followed by court action since death threats are punishable offenses. And yet, the phone company does not have right to cut your line off, unless judge ruled to do so (well, they could terminate your contract without the reason but then you would be able to go to court over this and phone company would end up covering all of the damages you claim).
Death threats are punishable offenses under the law. _UNDER THE LAW_!
Amazon is _not_ the LAW. Amazon is a public company like any other. They should report these actions to the police and they will investigate and take _legal_ action!
> They should report these actions to the police and they will investigate
They don't. The volume of death threats on the internet is far too high for that. Death threats are a routine part of internet discourse - except where deleted by moderators.
Quite often these systems are "immutable" and the post is available to the admins if required. This was found in the Parler hack, for example.
The question is kind of moot because the police don't ask for evidence and don't pursue these cases. Can you dig up a case where the police made this argument?
Since it’s electronic, it’s federal. We know the feds have abdicated their duties to investigate and prosecute people on their side. We’ll see it on full display when all preemptive pardons come out next week. Preemptive because the feds didn’t bother to prosecute.
These boycotts are often spoken of, but I never saw an actual successful example on industrial scale. Does an electricity company lose money because it provides power to Trump's mansion and people run away, not wanting to share the same electrons?
Even the BDS movement, probably the largest-scale boycott promoting organization in the world, pulled no one big into red numbers AFAIK.
Came here to post this. None of the arbitrary denial of service is new, it was just deployed against people without power. The right were completely fine with deplatforming sex workers through SESTA/FOSTA. I'm happy to see all the egregious machinery of things like the Patriot Act (unaccountable air travel blacklists!) being turned on the right for a change instead of just the left - because this time it's the right that's the terrorist threat.
I think it was only last week that we had somebody banned from github for simply logging in from Iran.
> Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with?
This isn't why they're being dropped though is it? I was under the impression they were being denied service because further terrorist attacks were being openly planned on their platform with no attempts at moderation happening.
Maybe when a service grows past some level it should become a kind of public space. The private company that created it and operates it loses the privilege of making rules about who can use it and how. That becomes a matter for courts. The company should be happy with the zillions of money it makes.
You’re thinking these big social media companies are like the telephone, but I would say they are more like newspapers. No one has been banned from using messenger apps, afaik, which I would say fits your metaphor better. And you can definitely find yourself banned from the editorial pages of every newspaper if you say enough evil things.
I think your first statement is hyperbole. There are countless times when the few controlled the dissemination of information to the masses. What about when only monks and scribes knew how to write? What about when the printing press had just been invented? What about in the early 20th century before television even existed?
If anything, people have been able to throw their opinions around more today than ever before in human history.
That was not a good time when William Randolph Hearst could help start wars. But the same thing happened in the 90s when the big networks helped start the second Gulf War with fake news about weapons of mass destruction. I, for one, am tired of being fed fake news by those in power.
I don't think that was really the newspapers on their own, they were being fed that by US intelligence services. Since there was basically zero ability to check the facts on the ground, they were left relaying lies - that had bipartisan popularity.
> I, for one, am tired of being fed fake news by those in power.
So am I. But the antidote to fake news from those in power is not even more fake news from random cultists and foreign intelligence services.
I have no love for big corporations, and I'm happy to finally see growing opposition to their capitalist power, but other kinds of "taboo" content, like porn, face the same hurdles and do fine. Taboo publishing has rarely been mainstream, and always held at arm's length from "civilised" business." Let's not pretend that Parler is shunned because of its users opinions on government spending; it's shunned because its violent content is so distasteful to most people that no one wants to touch it with a six foot flagpole.
It’s notable that per the CEO of Parker, banks and payment providers, law firms, and mail and texting services have cancelled on them. At the heart of this power is the freedom of association.
I'm not sure I'd go with the "never before" piece. Lots of people have been banned off lots of plaforms.
Take payment companies for example. If Visa and Mastercard decline to do business with you (as they did with Pornhub) you're basically stuffed. Lots of individual sex workers have also had this experience. You can't make money if the payment companies won't work with you.
Also if you look back at the history of censorship you'll find loads of examples where people were effectively de-platformed. One I was reading about recently. In 1970's UK a reggae artist called Judge Dredd held the record for most songs banned by the BBC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dread).
In those days, that's effectively de-platforming that artist and there for the great crime of ... double entendre.
>‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’
If you want to call a congress person an asshole, tell me that America isn't the greatest country in the world, say that the President is a treasonous tool then yes I will absolutely defend your right to say that, and more.
The minute it turns to violence, insurrection and death I will make sure the authorities know exactly where to find you. And if these actions violate a Terms of Service that you agreed to, you reap what you sow.
You being the generalized you.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Parler knew exactly what they were doing and who they were courting. As the saying goes, "well, well, well. if it isn't the consequences of my own actions".
> Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable.
Actually, yes, in most parts of the world the telephone company was under no obligation to provide service to anyone who wanted it and there were laws about what you could say or do over the telephone.
Why haven’t they sued google and Apple for taking down their app? They can try to move to another host, but they have no recourse against the oligopoly of app stores.
Pirate uses Cloudflare, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t gotten new content since 2014. So “still operating” is kind of pushing it (if it were really still operating, you’d see new content) even though major providers didn’t pull the plug.
As far as I can tell, The Pirate Bay is not relevant in 2020. If you want to watch Rick & Morty season 1 without paying for it, go ahead and use The Pirate Bay.
The hack of Parler after Twilio and Okta cut them off is way more interesting. Surprised that I haven't seen a thread on HN frontpage about that.
tl;dr failure of their user authentication system allowed anyone to make an account, including an admin account. they then privilege escalated and imaged the entire service and made a docker container that anyone can use. So whoever did the first thing maybe has liability under CFAA and other means, but everyone else doesn't and they are leaking everything.
User uploaded pictures still have metadata attached, including GPS coordinates. It is hilarious and also alarming.
It was actually posted multiple times last night but got flagged because the only source was an unverified reddit post that was later debunked by the researcher that actually downloaded the data. All of the data that was downloaded was via publicly accessible links, no admin privileges were necessary.
What legal reason prevents AWS from enforcing its terms of service, to which Parler has agreed? This is a simple question that I feel is ignored by any of the "censorship" arguments.
In recent memory tech companies started applying strict content moderation. This is a very new idea for social media, a very expensive idea as well. These companies existed for many many years with very little content moderation. I remember when Alex Jones was banned and main stream media in my country thought it was a bad thing, this was only a few years ago. To me this seems like the classic porter 5 forces model of regulations being used as a market force.
Similar to no dev wants to touch movie streaming because of the huge legal hurdles and mountain of paper work for each country.
So much discussion about a lawsuit that is nothing but a conspiracy theory formatted as a legal case.
I encourage everyone to read the first few pages of filing.
Parler alleges 2 things:
1. Anti-trust: Amazon kicked off Parler because it colluded with Twitter because Parler is a competitor to Twitter hence they violated The Sherman Act.
The reason this will fail is because Parler presented 0 evidence to support their allegations.
Evidence is the thing that differentiates a wrongdoing that can be litigated from a crackpot conspiracy theory.
This is a crackpot conspiracy theory and I can't wait to read the rebuttal from Amazon's lawyers. It's going to be a hoot.
2. Breach of contract: "it says we get 30 days notice and we didn't get 30 days".
Apparently Parler conveniently left out other parts of the contract.
One, the part that says you don't always get the 30 days.
Two, the part that says contract disputes are resolved via arbitration, not litigation.
So it's not going to fly either and is pointless to begin with.
The only remedy Parler could ask for is money and I'm sure Amazon will happily refund them 3 months of fees if for some unimaginable reason the court finds they did indeed breach the contract.
> One, the part that says you don't always get the 30 days.
> Two, the part that says contract disputes are resolved via arbitration, not litigation.
And honestly, this type of terms in a contract shouldn't be legal. Has far as i know, the second part is not even legal in most country outside of the US.
I don't really care for Parler but having big company abusing their position to have terms heavily in disadvantage of their client shouldn't be something we support. Because I guess most cloud-provider have the same type of clause.
Arbitration over litigation should be just plainly illegal.
I agree this lawsuit sounds meritless. I suspect this was the plan all along for Parler. They refused moderating there content knowing full well that they will be banned. Then they go about crying victim and filling meritless lawsuit to put up a show. Very similar to the meritless lawsuits that were filled for elections fraud.
This CloudPundit article makes the case that AWS is a second-tier ISP and thus has to comply with upstream Acceptable Use Policies. Otherwise they would be in a position where their Internet connectivity could, theoretically, be shut down. So they enforce the "inherited" AUP policies, perhaps tightened even further by their own lawyers, downstream on their cloud customers. Who, in turn, have to enforce them on the end-users. Which is what Parler refused to do.
The overall picture painted is that Internet access is widely self-regulated and limited by this complex network of AUPs, and that it is difficult or impossible for any single ISP or cloud provider to act independently and set their own terms. What do Hacker News people think? Is this true?
I like others I know find Amazon and others behaviour in this matter wrong not because of their actions but because of a long history of inaction there appears to be a very obvious bias and selective enforcement of their so called policies and rules. This is politics and public companies have an obligation to shareholders to be apolitical, if this wasn’t the case Amazon wouldn’t do business with the CCP
The internet was founded on principles of free speech, and it still works that way. Parler can go build servers, connect them to the internet, and come back online.
They're not being censored, they're being inconvenienced.
Very alarming to see the level of apologism in these threads for the appaling actions of the big tech companies. You celebrate today because what they are doing is aligning with your political views. Just wait, this wont stop there, you're next.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadI’ve been having a good laugh at Parler folk and their sympathizers.
My prediction is this will only radicalise people further by giving them a persecution complex.
How is this relevant in Parler's case? It is not demanding any state policy changes. It is not threatening anyone with violence. It just wants to be open for business, so that its users, including Trump supporters, could talk to each other.
Shutting down Parler and others like them is for the greater good.
EDIT: Also, Amazon told them to moderate their content or get booted. Parler didn't do so, got booted.
In some cases (not saying this one), in fact they do owe you.
"Four men wearing Nazi lapel pins who were refused service and evicted from a German restaurant in Torrance won a legal victory Thursday when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that their civil rights were violated."
[1]https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-11-mn-1358-s...
You will learn over the coming years that silencing ones critics does not make them go away or make them less angry. What you will find is that moderates, such as myself, who want a balanced view of what is actually going on will be forced to seek out information from sources which become more and more partisan and extreme in their tone.
Neither of us really wants this to happen but this is the road you currently appear willing to travel.
I think we've already seen how terrible things can go when veering too far right and I'm HOPING the ones in/come into power will be mindful enough to compensate.
While I strike a positive tone with the implosion of Parler, I am not blind to what could feasible happen to other communities. I am sympathetic to the trials of the sex industry, what with Patreon and payment providers effectively cutting off their livelihoods.
A truly balanced view of the news is not happening, even with A.I. assisted processes (human bias is embedded in A.I.) but I think that's your best bet.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117318/
BTW Miloš Forman is one of the best Czech filmmakers ever, but he only flourished to full glory when he moved to the US.
If I had proposed as a thought experiment, a hypothetical "proto-fascist social media site that facilitated a failed insurrection based on outlandish conspiracies and disinformation" to argue something, most would claim it's an absurd outlier and shouldn't be used because it's not generally representative.
But here we are. That's the risk. Arguments that normally would be summarily dismissed will be taken as legitimate. This is also exactly the window of time where otherwise unacceptable laws will be accepted (like the AUMF after 9/11) It's potentially a dangerous time with long lasting effects that will be hard to claw back and we should tread lightly and carefully knowing these tendencies.
We still haven't been able to spin down the military expansionism from 80 years ago after pearl harbor for instance. These systems can take on a life of their own and become really hard to undo. Careful careful.
I believe there are real antitrust questions regarding Amazon but getting booted from AWS doesn’t seem to connect with any of them. Amazon does not compete with Parler.
Seems like one of the funny things about the internet is that as “free” as it seems to be sometimes, there is no part of the internet that is really a public space. Everything on the internet is owned by somebody. There are no public roads, no sidewalks, no easements on the internet. If this were about a physical space like a store, you can get banned from the store but still protest outside on the sidewalk. If AWS were a “common carrier” then it would need strong justifications for banning customers.
I don’t see any of these legal arguments playing out here.
I'd much prefer important questions in society be brought up by the right people for the right reasons.
Arguably that's the real boycott, not just being tossed off Amazon, but the fact that a very small number of companies have comparable infrastructure, and they're all saying no.
But how do you litigate against being sent to Coventry?
There is really nothing stopping a "hosting for radical and extremists" cloud service from existing. In fact, it does exist, and it's named Epik. Their dedictated hosting prices look quite high to me, but that's just the free market in action.
Now when they also get rejected by every other web host, or a sufficiently large fraction, it gets more interesting: are they coordinating, actively or implicitly? Or are they following the same thought process, and ending uo at the same result, independently? Does it matter?
Any supermarket can ban you for not wearing a shirt. What if they all ban you, and you just can't buy either a shirt or food?
Is the latter different, because it's about survival?
if you get thrown out of every bar in town for bad behaviour, do you have an anti-trust case against them? What if they operate a ban list, and one or two incidents are enough to cut you off?
Anyway... Parler is mouldy: both toxic and toast. And slippery slope is a fallacy. So this is really all upside, as far as I can tell.
Providers will quite rightly claim a right to compensation for reputational damage. If I have to provide service to Parler, I want it known that this is not my choice, for example.
The most case I could see them actually having would be if IANA refused to allow them to be listed in the root zone DNS servers, and if basic connectivity were being denied - because that's the very basics of internet connectivity. Everything else is just making things easier, but it's all being done because someone else wants to do it.
Freedom of association then becomes a significant issue because hate speech is not a protected class.
except for the timing (immediately post-Georgia runoff), the sudden reversal in policy, the possible appearance of collusion or antitrust violation (something else the courts will likely decide), Amazon's responses to similar speech on other hosted customer sites, and of course, what's actually written in the contract between the two companies. Not saying Parler has a valid case, but there are plenty of issues to sort through, it's not as cut-and-dry as you seem to think.
One of the complaints argues "...requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service". There may be exclusions or other terms which override the 30-days, if so, surely that will come out during discovery or via Amazon's response.
2) AWS has a market share in "cloud" of 32% where there is a vibrant array of competitors e.g. Alibaba, Azure, DigitalOcean, GCP, Oracle, IBM, Tencent etc. And in the broader hosting space their share is likely to be in the single digits. Any notion of an antitrust violation seems baseless.
From this things get complicated. Some stuff is obviously illegal and people know it. And other stuff some people agree with and others don't.
What do you think happens when a public corporation takes the role of a judge and sides with either party? Where is the legality of this?
Since you mention children. WTF is going on in USA with the gender changes on children? This should be considered child abuse and parents should be stripped from their rights. Or is this not on par with child pornography?
Seems to me that the timing was after a seditious mob tried to mount an insurrection against the elected government while they were trying to fulfill their constitutional duties. Like it or not, that's not something any major corporation wants to be associated with.
There are. From what I can see, section 7.2.b.ii.A via 6.1.b and 8.2.c (violation of the Acceptable Use Policy due to harmful or offensive content) or possibly even 6.1.a.i (security risk to third party) of the AWS Customer Agreement could apply.
According to the Amazon letter, over the "past several weeks", Parler was asked to remove 98 posts by AWS, which they allegedly did not do in a timely manner. Parler claims that's a misrepresentation, because they removed everything they were asked to "over the last few days".
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
From all accounts Parler was self-moderated by the community and links such as the following are still present:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgBxXcAAuTkC?format=jpg&name=...
And as we all know twitter applies their community guidelines equally on all its users regardless of their political stance.
This is a flat out lie.
It's politics and anyone pretending differently is lying.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
For a company based in the most racism-sensitive part of the Western world, they do not seem to care as much for non-American instances thereof. Their response in Myanmar was far from adequate. They took down a few accounts after a few months and that was that.
Let's take into account that parler (and other platforms) caused 1 night of rioting.
Facebook caused GENOCIDE - the active killing of a population.
It's straight up partisan censorship now that the party that controls twitter/amazon/facebook/google also controls their regulating body.
It's a case of regulatory capture.
How much does this really cost them? I doubt Parler has that much money to put up a big legal fight.
This is a cheap a PR win for Amazon.
> you can always let know authorities about any danger, report and ban users
One contradicts the other? They didn't do #2, so #1 happened.
If tech companies shut down services that are actively supporting an existential threat to the US as a constitutional republic, it seems to me that it's their clear moral and ethical duty to stop providing service to those threats if at all possible.
Furthermore, at this point it's clearly in their self interest to break all ties with Parler, since they open themselves to liability if Parler organizes another successful terrorist attack, now that they know that such activities are being organized there.
If anything, I would argue that they should have policed that content in a much more opinionated fashion far sooner. It's only because things have escalated to the point of violence that it's now so controversial.
Let me give an example to illustrate - suppose that Al Queda, or ISIS, or some other terrorist organization was using AWS or GCP. Would it be so controversial to refuse service to those organizations then? At the very least I don't see why as private businesses they couldn't decide that serving such organizations is too much risk to take on.
Here is a link to the lawsuit
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/1/parler-llc-v...
I'm wondering why nobody talks about the recently arrested BLM activist who was armed and in the crowd in Capitol hill seen encouraging people to commit violence and destroy property property.
Fortunately, Amazon does not need to prove that it is exclusively for violence.
All Parler's lawyer need to do is show them the exact same vitrol on Twitter to highlight how shaky Amazon's argument is.
I don't expect a fair trial free from political furor going on right now. It's amazingly easy to manipulate the crowd when they are too tired to be objective from the information overload. 1984 might as well been the Les Prophéties of 21st century.
This is completely false.
> In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.
> “Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”
I am not an English major, but from a reading of those two paragraphs, it does not seem to me that AWS has claimed that Parler is solely used for violence.
And, no, that's also not a claim it has made. They are just an arbiter of their TOS.
Your understanding of this situation seems to be defined by how you want the facts of the case to be, rather than what the actual facts of the case are.
Wow. Within minutes my comment was flagged for simply reporting what I read from mainstream media.
I get that HN has a strong political bias but outright censorship of facts that threatens your narrative only hurts the rest of us with centrist views.
I want Trump gone too, but we cannot get swept up by emotions because it has no place in the judicial system, or at least if shouldn't but that may be a tall order.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/capitol-hill-riots-seattle-police...
According to the article, someone identifying with the BLM movement was present in the mob that attacked capitol hill. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe that this person is some kind of agent provocateur. I did not find any report that he claimed to be a journalist, independent or otherwise.
In any significant protest, mob, or riot there is going to be a mix of different people with different agendas. The idea that somehow the capitol hill mob was caused by agent provocateurs is… well, entirely possible but it doesn’t absolve anyone who participated of responsibility for their actions.
You don't find this odd at all?
BLM, like most civil rights movements, is loosely organized and generally not playing 4D chess. Same applies to hate groups / white nationalist movements, in general. If there’s anything suspicious going on, it’s probably Parler. Seems like Parler was half agitprop and half honeypot. But I’d be willing to believe that this was incompetence & opportunism, since it seems like there’s plenty of incompetence and cut corners to go around. Rich people always fantasize about controlling the media but don’t realize how expensive it is to actually succeed at it, and Parler reads like a 21st century version of a rich family buying a newspaper to try and influence national politics (except it turns out, this is harder than they thought).
Parler CEO: "AWS terminated our services. I want you to sue them for violation of antitrust laws!"
Established Lawyer or Firm: "AWS had rights to terminate this contract for $reasons and their contract specifies binding arbitration. You have no case and if you pursue this we decline to represent you."
Parler CEO: "You're canceling us! I'll find another firm!"
You can always find a single proprietorship to file anything but a respectable firm or lawyer will decline cases like this.
What if you want to shift it all off the cloud, can you still mimic the infrastructure on a vps? I thought that’s what stuff like serverless allowed?
Feels like this something we should be able to do, no? All this talk about WASM to make portable code, but Parler cannot even just move their shit to another server?
There has to be a abstract layer that lets you leverage anything with a unified api across aws/google/azure/etc. Why in god’s name are we directly tying our shit to one provider?
Do frameworks like this not exist at all?
Look, if 4chan can be hosted somewhere, your site can be hosted somewhere lol. No need to cry and sue Amazon, this should be solved at the tech level.
4chan dealt with every scenario under the sun, and they made the adjustments and is still here, and no one is able to take it down. We cannot sit here and act like it can’t be done because the Titans are preventing it. It’s just not true, we have to simply get better about this. No excuses.
I didn't follow the 4chan thing well, but weren't they also down for a while? Edit: my bad, that was 8chan, who went offline for three months in 2019, as per Wikipedia.
Why weren't they prepared for this?
I get the feeling the people behind it were a bit incompetent and really only in it for money.
Not true believers of free speech.
Never before in history has a small cabal of companies welded such power over what we can say and who we're able to associate with. In one concerted ban action, you can be cut off from most of your friends and the ability to express yourself in any forums that have more than a tiny reach. After being banned from the big three, you are now excluded from pretty much everything your friends do and say, and your chances in any political field are essentially zero. You even lose the ability to use many services that require the big three for authentication or verification.
Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with? Unthinkable. And yet here we are with the modern equivalent.
These companies have subsumed a not insignificant amount of power that was until now only within the purview of governments, with that power presumably subject to the will of the people and democratic ideals of free speech. You still weren't allowed to incite violence with your speech, for example, but investigation of that kind of behavior was the job of the police, and punishment the job of the justice system. And the bar was pretty high before censoring someone, as it should be in a non-totalitarian state.
These lawsuits need to happen because we NEED to delineate where responsibilities lay in terms of protecting our rights as free citizens. And that always starts with the most despised of society because they're almost always the ones to trigger these questions.
‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’
It's interesting how tech people will endlessly argue about some minor details regarding privacy in some mediocre-usage phone app but huge precedents like these are swallowed without criticism because of political stances.
Now, if the consequence is to strike a point against the enemy party, it seems both formations unconsciously agree to sacrifice some piece of democracy or freedom. In the end everybody lose and society decays.
It's much less easy to think about ways to negate them as a political force without hurting everyone else in the process, and it seems a lot of people don't even care about weighing costs and benefits.
Unfortunately, when the modern political sphere is highly influenced by idiots on Twitter who are permanently stuck on first-level thinking, this is what you get.
Is it really the modern equivalent? People are not getting banned here over what they say in Twitter DMs. They are getting banned over what they publish on their timelines.
You have a right to free speech, not a right to free publication. If you want to publish your opinions you will have to pay for that yourself if you can't find anyone willing to pay the costs for you.
I will defend your right to say what you want, but I won't buy you a printing press.
There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless. It's much simpler to just not do business with them than it is to try and develop a pricing model that accounts for those things.
I am sure Amazon hosts a lot of sites that I don't agree with but that doesn't mean I will hold them accountable. It is simply stupid.
If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did (at least if you compare equal shitty places like Twitter), hold Parler accountable and not Amazon for hosting them.
Don't be part of the angry mob. Be smarter.
Let me rephrase: "Parler paid its bills" is missing several variables in the equation.
Do not read into it any further than that.
> There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless.
What negative publicity do you mean if not political ones from one specific point of view? For me, parler did nothing other than offer an alternative to twitter which is equal shitty.
Amazon didn't have any publicity regarding this matter until they decided, together with a lot of other megacorps to remove everything associated with parler. Now they have had a lot of publicity, which is in my view very negative since now everyone knows that if you want to host anything that support any other viewpoint than those held by american megacorps you can be removed.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone can think this is good publicity.
At no point did I express agreement with any of these things. That is what you seem to be finding in my speech that's not there. I thought explicitly clarifying might help.
Trying to read into more than what's written and using that as a basis to tell me to "be smarter" is unnecessarily rude.
My mistake for opening up a vaguely political thread on HN, I'm out.
It just doesn't make sense, unless you believe Parler is bad in some kind of way and the only way they could've been bad is political.
Not the previous commenter, but Parler absolutely did commit wrongdoing, and that wrongdoing was absolutely not political. Calls for murder and violent insurrection are not political statements!
Do twitter call our for #killallmen when that hashtag is trending?
Your double standards are so very obvious.
>If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did
Political reasons?!
They didn't do anything wrong?!
Parler was knowingly and willingly hosting content that was glorifying and inciting actual physical, deadly violence. Calls to skin politicians and their families are okay with you?!
Nowhere that I know of protected that kind of thing as free expression.
It's not political speech. It left the realm of political speech a long time ago.
It should have done it a while ago (violent rhetoric didn't just pop up on there last week), but better late than never.
Otherwise, no contract will be worth the paper it is written on if a mob can just scream on Twitter and get a perfectly legal site taken down on very short notice. I'd be very hesitant to sign a contract with any company that doesn't include extremely high termination fees that would be sufficient to find a new host.
AWS works on a consumption model, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the customer also have reservations with AWS for resources covering at least the next few months. Whether AWS can terminate the supply of services depend entirely on the service agreement. IIRC, AWS has a number of options of terminating a user's services in its service agreement, such as abuse of service, which hosting content inciting seditious violence most likely falls under.
This may well be the legal position, but I think people are wondering whether it should be this way.
The first electricity providers were (I think, mostly) likewise completely private & free to sell or not as they pleased. But as they grew, and our dependence on their product grew, the rules changed. They are now regulated differently, and have to sell to all who pay their bills. And nobody thinks it a stain on ConEd's reputation when they are found to have been selling power to porn-studios or gun-makers (i.e. legal activities some find distasteful), nor to weed-growers or mafia-run warehouses (illegal activities, but we don't expect ConEd to hire deeply investigate every connection).
Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses? Or something more like a cable TV service, where they bear some responsibility for what's communicated in the channels being provided?
It is always good to recall history. The origin of antitrust laws lies in the late 19th century, when a lot of railroad companies consolidated into a few mammoths. Back then, there were basically no regulations around the use of railroads, which were built by private capital.
Nevertheless, railroads became an important infrastructure of the nation, and the convergence of power towards just a few hands meant that the situation became untenable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._Uni...
I can see the parallels to the digital giants of today fairly well.
Amazon (the webstore) on the other hand is getting close, and with the core business of the other FAANGs.
This is what I find so disturbing about the Parler fiasco. Every tech person I know has interacted with AWS directly at some point. Everyone any of us knows has interacted with something reliant on AWS. What's the percentage of web services that run on AWS now? It's well over a third IIRC. AWS is essentially indispensable at this point. It might very well be called a technological utility.
Moreover AWS's core market has, historically, been startups. Parler, being a startup, was in their core group of customers, dealing with a service that had effectively become ubiquitous among startups. They were an American company, with a CEO and investors and users and capital.
Being a B2B service, bordering on a technological utility, rather than a B2C online community like Facebook or Twitter, the idea of AWS banning users seems almost a category error. The idea of AWS banning an American startup would have been unthinkable to me before it happened.
EDIT: Moved some phrases around for clarity.
https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bakersfield-bakery-own...
Whereas a grocery store refusing to sell things off the shelf to some group of people would be a very different matter.
(To be clear, I'm not taking any position on the particular cake case linked. There are many & details differ.)
The law currently only protects against certain types of discrimination, but high competition protects against all of them (assuming there isn't collusion).
"We have a clause in your contract that says you shouldnt print 'kill all the x' and you're letting just about anyone print those. We can still rent you servers if you put a content-filtering team into effect"
But Parler didn't.
If nobody wanted to listen then there would be `one to nobody`. But it seems many wanted to listen, even if another many wanted him to shut up..
Parler paying to aws was paying for its users free speech.
The question is not about paying costs, but about people trying to use business as a weapon in their ideological war.
As I understand those who were involved in any crime are going to be chased and put in front of the judge.
I had to look this up and it took a while to find the answer. There is no clear decision to say whether bakeries can reuse to sell cakes to gay people.
And saying: "Sure. I will make you a cake" and then spoil the wedding by not delivering in the last minute.
I was simply saying that it's not so clear cut as to whether a baker can refuse service to anyone and they please. The Supreme Court ruled that Colorado was biased against the defendant, not that their anti-discrimination law was illegal.
GP comment is right - they could have given a 30d notice but instead they went for a kill (coordinated with others (FB, TW) to purge at the same time and for maximum damage to service, data security and reputation of their customer)
I think it is perfectly normal that community want to have a certain quality and moderate for this reason. Are we going to complain that HN ban trolls because it impede on their "free-speech" ? Or spammer ?
The case of Amazon is different though. If you have a contract with a company and the company terminate the contract with no valid reason, you should sue. It is their right to break the contract because they don't want to deal with you, but then they have to pay a fine because they were engaged in a contract with you and they broke it.
That would depend on the terms.
If my memory is correct, those kind of catch-all terms where deemed non-applicable in the EU, but it doesn't prevent company from still putting them in the hope that you won't sue them afterward.
Getting banned over harassment in a DM is not the same as getting banned over expressing your opinion in a DM.
yes, lets look at it from a legal stand point.
Utilities like the phone company are granted special privileges under the law, in exchange for society granting them those special privileges they must service all persons in their service area provided they pay the bill (and in some cases even if they do not)
Now lets look at social media and other platform, we as a society have granted them special provisions under the law, the most well known today is Section 230 but there are others. I do not believe it is unreasonable then to demand these platform be require to allow all persons to speak provided their speech is legal speech.
This is standard would be massively more open than the current moderation standards of the platforms today
Now each one of the platforms are free to fore go those special legal provisions, and be treated as publishers, like say a NYTimes, or a DailyWire publication. Under those rules then they have full and complete editorial control over everything on their site but they also assume more legal liability.
What the platforms today want is a little bit of A, and a little bit of B, I think that is not what we as a society should allow
They need to choose, are they platforms or publishers
Not only is TechDirt take factually incorrect on the history of Section 230, I am talking about REFORMS to Section 230 to make it CLEAR what the section should mean, which IMO should be legal speech, not simply allow the platforms to set their own moderation standards
The Ninth Circuit has as stated the intent of Section 230 was "Congress wanted to encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet, and to promote the development of e-commerce"
The clear purpose of section 230 is promote not impede free speech. TechDirt on the whole has taken very pro-censorship stances provided it is "mah private companies" doing the censorship
This is not inline with the actual facts of law, nor it is inline with how we as a society should be progressing
I know it may come as a shock but people can have differing opinions from TechDirt....
I can't find that Ninth Circuit rulling you're referring to. The closest I can find is Barnes v. Yahoo! where the court ruled a company can't be compelled under the CDA to ban someone. In that ruling the Ninth circuit said that congress wanted to “promote the free exchange of information and ideas over the Internet and to encourage voluntary monitoring for offensive or obscene material.”.
I can't find a ruling that says the intention of section 230 was to enforce unfettered free speech. Rather as I understand it section 230 is there to protect companies who want to publish a myriad of opinions by clarifying that it is the user who is liable for what they say, not the company that runs the website
Batzel v. Smith [1][2]
>>Rather as I understand it section 230 is there to protect companies who want to publish a myriad of opinions by clarifying that it is the user who is liable for what they say, not the company that runs the website
The 2 congressmen that created the law are on record talking about how they did not want speech on the internet to be stifled because of legal liabilities if they moderated some content, the primary justification/rhetoric at the time like most laws designed to allow censorship/moderation was "think of the children, children might see some boobs or franks and be scared for life"
"The broad language of Section 230’s protection reflects the intent to protect the industry and its users’ ability to communicate freely." [1]
It was not conceived at the time of the Sections passage the internet companies would start to bann their "users" or "customers" from the service for political speech, such a thing was really unheard of during that time in American History, it just was not done.
Times have changed, the law needs to be updated to reflect the original intent of the law which was and is to expand not limit speech
[1]https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2019/08/correcting-the...
[2]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163765021797671...
Section 230 is not limiting speech, these companies would've had the right to delete people's posts and ban users with or without section 230.
The intent was to encourage free speech by telling companies: "Don't worry, you won't be held liable for posts from your users, but you do have a responsibility to moderate". Which you can argue they weren't liable for in the first place, because they only provided the platform not the speech.
You can definitely argue for an expansion of section 230 into a new "opinion neutrality" law, but it is not the true intent of section 230 that you make it out to be.
Afaict section 230 isn't a special provision granted by society, it is a legal clarification of existing rights of speech & assembly that has the effect of limiting certain types of frivolous lawsuits. Clarifications seem materially different than government granting a corporation a local monopoly. The latter should definitely have strings attached, but the former?
Now you could argue that the basis for the decision to grant utilities local monopolies is rooted in similar natural monopoly circumstances (economies of scale and resource limitations) as that of mainstream social networks (physical infra & space in former, network effects in latter), and I'd probably agree, but that would be an entirely different focus than section 230 reform.
You're also advocating for a very black & white solution (platform v publisher, based on a choice about moderation), but there's a lot of specifics lacking such that its hard to determine if that's even a good idea. My immediate reaction is: online communities are extremely varied in both operation and medium (design, algorithms, what 'speech' even is, etc), and anyone who has had the experience of building and operating communities would see 'all legal speech should be published' as frankly a laughable premise. It raises far more questions than it answers, and likely just kicks the hard work of how products are designed over to lawyers who will definitely get it wrong.
My hunch is we're barking up the wrong tree with 230, and the underlying issue is too much power concentrated in too few entities. They have too much control over too many people's experiences, and when they use that power people confuse it with censorship. If we focused on the issue of natural monopolies arising from network effects, we might come to very different solutions, like decentralization with standard protocols for social graph interoperability.
I tend to agree there, my focus on 230 is simply because that seems to be only avenue open for reform at the moment, it is not the best tool to solve the problem, but it is a tool
Ultimately I think the root of the problem comes down to 2 flaws in the foundation of the legal system
1. Data ownership: We have incorrectly applied ownership rights to the companies that collect the data, instead of allowing people to own the data about themselves. This has had wide ramifications on how social media companies have been formed and monetized, as well as in criminal law
2. Failing in contract law to properly designate the current slate of "Terms of Service" and "Acceptable Use" agreements as Unconscionable Contracts, these contracts are soo one-sided that if put in to use for anything other then "Information services" they would be tossed out of court and be unenforceable. Companies should be required to have better, enforceable agreements with their users, that provide CLEAR and OBJECTIVE statement on what the service can be used for, that the process for ending the relationship is, and what the recourse is for the customer (i.e appeal, data portability, etc). Today they have none of that, and are so steeped in self serving legal verbiage with absolutely zero considerations for the user, this type of contract / agreement should not be allowed in a fair and just legal system.
Another concern: by your logic, net neutrality should be moot. Let ISPs choose and throttle online service by their whim.
Anyway,"freedom of speech" is actually intended to prevent any dictatorial entity from hiding the other side from the public.
imho, If the 'democrats' are actually 'democratic', they should have solved this with a much more elegant solution - eg. inviting people to a common, shared platform and refuting them there. Current FB/twitter/aws solutions are rather 'easy but dictatorial and may backfire', which is somewhat 'republican' in taste...
(* by backfire: pro-trumps can think: "The other side is trying to snuff us. What are they hiding? Are they more evil than imaginable? We should do something to guard USA from them"
imho, the root of the whole fiasco is actually the press preventing the broadcast of Trump after the election. (the 'snuffing') Better solution would be having open discussions to refute the pro-trump people.
Another thing is that by-standers will note about how 'undemocratic' the whole solution is, and whether they'll also be treated if they end up being the 'other' side of other issues
My argument was that your right to freedom of speech does not compel others to publish your speech.
If you send me an e-mail with your opinion and the instruction to forward it to all my contacts, then I am not violating your freedom of speech by refusing to do so.
And yes, freedom of speech does not protect net neutrality. That's why we need the FCC to set those rules and enforce them.
What some people are arguing for is a sort of "opinion neutrality" for social media companies that forces them to treat all opinions equally without moderation.
You can certainly debate the pros and cons of such a rule, but it's not a consequence of your right to freedom of speech.
By your logic, it's OK for Bill Gates to buy all the press influence to completely silence the politically-other-side.
And my mention of net neutrality is to show how flawed your whole logic process is.
> What some people are arguing for is a sort of "opinion neutrality" for social media companies that forces them to treat all opinions equally without moderation.
hm I actually find this scary. Maybe you're from China, where deviant opinions/minorities must be snuffed down for "harmonious society"?
That is not OK, for the very simple reason you shouldn't be allowed to monopolize the media or any industry for that matter. The way you protect free speech is by not allowing any company to become so large and powerful that it rivals governments and can enact censorship.
> And my mention of net neutrality is to show how flawed your whole logic process is.
I don't see how that points out a flaw? I just explained that net neutrality is not protected under freedom of speech, so I don't see its relevance.
> hm I actually find this scary. Maybe you're from China, where deviant opinions/minorities must be snuffed down for "harmonious society"?
Thank you for keeping the discussion respectful. I don't think opinions should be snuffed out, but I also think you shouldn't be forced by the government to publish lies. I worry that if governments can force companies to publish all opinions including the ones they don't agree with, then they can also force them to publish propaganda.
Now do wedding cakes!!
Sure. They can go say it to their mates down the pub. Private companies also generally have the right to choose who they do business with.
Yeah, no. Any time before the internet, getting any sort of publicity was a thousand times harder with lots of very real gatekeepers.
Include anyone but white/male/hetero/christian/upper-middle-class-or-better people in your consideration, and the idea that freedom of speech went anywhere but up, almost vertically, in the last decade or two is laughable.
Maybe freedom of speech went up, vertically, meaning more people can publish than ever before, but it got extremely narrow at the same time. If you publish the wrong thought your life or business can be literally destroyed within a day. (or as long as it takes to fly to Africa)
And let's be clear: nobody gets "literally destroyed", nor even figuratively, for publishing "one wrong thought". Parler had been peddling in low-effort violence-porn for the lowlifes that make up their userbase for what.. two years? That's hundreds of thousands of terrible... "thoughts". And nothing happened, until something happened, which happened to be peoples' deaths and a crisis of democracy.
For comparison: reddit got into hot water at some point, and managed to clean up their act. The porn websites are in a similar process. It's all just actions-have-consequences, really. And the public's ire is actually the more nuanced, soft approach to do it, compared to the blunt tool of criminal law.
Jewish and female authors were absolutely commonplace before the invention of the Internet.
(Switching to "counts" makes it more obvious)
I'm afraid it isn't going to swing that way. We're closer to allowing utility companies to cut people off arbitrarily than we are to forcing internet companies to keep serving users who hurt their business.
You have those already, facebook operates according to US laws. If not, it will be prosecuted. Of course, maybe government mandated ones will be better? Like public television in my country, where it is just a propaganda machine for currently ruling party? You think it will not be "moderated" by ruling party in US when operated as a public government owned utility?
Right, there will likely be a licensing regime that comes out of this which does tie user-generated content platforms to the state, reducing their ability to make arbitrary decisions.
what they shut off is their television show / public feed of people calling for violence. it's completely justified.
Right, this is more akin to Fox/CNN/MSNBC deciding they're not going to allow you a platform.
Yes, and as part of that _regulated_ monopoly, they were required to provide "universal" service: it didn't matter how remote the customer was or how inconvenient it would be to provide them with service, telephone service had to be provided to anyone who was willing to pay the (regulated) monthly fee.
Not really.
Like many others I was born without Internet and never before in history so many people said so many things, multiple times a day, from anywhere they are, to a potentially global audience, paying nothing
Never before in history has each individual had the ability to broadcast their thoughts so widely so easily.
Twitter/Facebook/AWS/etc can all refuse to do business with you. You can still throw an old computer in your basement and plug it into the internet and make your thoughts accessible to the entire world.
Domain name registrar or TLD banned you too?
Great, pick another registrar. Pick another TLD. Pick another country with different laws. You can do it all from the country you currently inhabit and the comfort of your office chair. You can make your site accessible via IP address or virtually unblockable via Tor.
Even if you're violating the laws and norms of the country you inhabit, you can host this in a way that's virtually untraceable back to you with little effort.
How exactly did one accomplish that in 1930? 1830? 1730? 1630?
What ability did a peasant in 830AD have to broadcast their thoughts across the entire world that we lack today?
No company should be forced to lose money. That’s what we are asking Amazon to do. They were going to lose customers if they kept hosting Parler.
Policing is out, we talking about the same people who failed to activate the national guard allowing the siege of our capital.
As a public company, their terms of service are as questionable as EULAs that no-one reads. I don't think (know) if they were ever tested in court. But it's about time they do.
--edit--
especially when crimes were committed by some incopetent judge/policeman.
I don't think it should have been deleted at all. Let concerned citizens sue Lin wood (whoever that is) and present his threat as evidence. Why should we expect people's words to be deleted from a public platform?
If nobody sued him, or went to the police, maybe it wasn't a real threat. Or maybe it wasn't illegal. Who are we to judge? Let the "neighbors" take it to the police and to the courts.
I really wish today's social platforms functioned like Slashdot. Their philosophy was to never delete anything posted by users, unless compelled by a court of law. That's the right thing to do.
But I thought phone companies had obligations of universal service (in most places), so that they are not free to cut people off based on rumors & internal committees.
Not really, you would have police visiting you, probably followed by court action since death threats are punishable offenses. And yet, the phone company does not have right to cut your line off, unless judge ruled to do so (well, they could terminate your contract without the reason but then you would be able to go to court over this and phone company would end up covering all of the damages you claim).
They don't. The volume of death threats on the internet is far too high for that. Death threats are a routine part of internet discourse - except where deleted by moderators.
The question is kind of moot because the police don't ask for evidence and don't pursue these cases. Can you dig up a case where the police made this argument?
Edit: oh the hilarity, here's the same discussion 22 years previously on the "decentralised" system USENET: https://www.wired.com/1998/03/canceling-the-evidence-on-usen...
I believe AOL lived to cancel again.
Even the BDS movement, probably the largest-scale boycott promoting organization in the world, pulled no one big into red numbers AFAIK.
Or imagine not being able to use the banking system because banks don't like you're dealing with legal weed ?
Or getting cut from payment processors as a sex worker ?
Unthinkable, right.
I think it was only last week that we had somebody banned from github for simply logging in from Iran.
This isn't why they're being dropped though is it? I was under the impression they were being denied service because further terrorist attacks were being openly planned on their platform with no attempts at moderation happening.
Maybe the next clause in this highschool-level aphorism should be "although I will not compel anybody to help you say it".
I think your first statement is hyperbole. There are countless times when the few controlled the dissemination of information to the masses. What about when only monks and scribes knew how to write? What about when the printing press had just been invented? What about in the early 20th century before television even existed?
If anything, people have been able to throw their opinions around more today than ever before in human history.
I don't think that was really the newspapers on their own, they were being fed that by US intelligence services. Since there was basically zero ability to check the facts on the ground, they were left relaying lies - that had bipartisan popularity.
> I, for one, am tired of being fed fake news by those in power.
So am I. But the antidote to fake news from those in power is not even more fake news from random cultists and foreign intelligence services.
Also, email is still available, don't pretend these services are all there is, it just isn't so.
Take payment companies for example. If Visa and Mastercard decline to do business with you (as they did with Pornhub) you're basically stuffed. Lots of individual sex workers have also had this experience. You can't make money if the payment companies won't work with you.
Also if you look back at the history of censorship you'll find loads of examples where people were effectively de-platformed. One I was reading about recently. In 1970's UK a reggae artist called Judge Dredd held the record for most songs banned by the BBC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dread).
In those days, that's effectively de-platforming that artist and there for the great crime of ... double entendre.
If you want to call a congress person an asshole, tell me that America isn't the greatest country in the world, say that the President is a treasonous tool then yes I will absolutely defend your right to say that, and more.
The minute it turns to violence, insurrection and death I will make sure the authorities know exactly where to find you. And if these actions violate a Terms of Service that you agreed to, you reap what you sow.
You being the generalized you.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Parler knew exactly what they were doing and who they were courting. As the saying goes, "well, well, well. if it isn't the consequences of my own actions".
Actually, yes, in most parts of the world the telephone company was under no obligation to provide service to anyone who wanted it and there were laws about what you could say or do over the telephone.
They had their lawyers ready, waaayy before they pulled the plug.
They should have tried another route. thepiratebay is still operating.
As far as I can tell, The Pirate Bay is not relevant in 2020. If you want to watch Rick & Morty season 1 without paying for it, go ahead and use The Pirate Bay.
It sure has.
tl;dr failure of their user authentication system allowed anyone to make an account, including an admin account. they then privilege escalated and imaged the entire service and made a docker container that anyone can use. So whoever did the first thing maybe has liability under CFAA and other means, but everyone else doesn't and they are leaking everything.
User uploaded pictures still have metadata attached, including GPS coordinates. It is hilarious and also alarming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25729088
Similar to no dev wants to touch movie streaming because of the huge legal hurdles and mountain of paper work for each country.
I encourage everyone to read the first few pages of filing.
Parler alleges 2 things:
1. Anti-trust: Amazon kicked off Parler because it colluded with Twitter because Parler is a competitor to Twitter hence they violated The Sherman Act.
The reason this will fail is because Parler presented 0 evidence to support their allegations.
Evidence is the thing that differentiates a wrongdoing that can be litigated from a crackpot conspiracy theory.
This is a crackpot conspiracy theory and I can't wait to read the rebuttal from Amazon's lawyers. It's going to be a hoot.
2. Breach of contract: "it says we get 30 days notice and we didn't get 30 days".
Apparently Parler conveniently left out other parts of the contract.
One, the part that says you don't always get the 30 days.
Two, the part that says contract disputes are resolved via arbitration, not litigation.
So it's not going to fly either and is pointless to begin with.
The only remedy Parler could ask for is money and I'm sure Amazon will happily refund them 3 months of fees if for some unimaginable reason the court finds they did indeed breach the contract.
And honestly, this type of terms in a contract shouldn't be legal. Has far as i know, the second part is not even legal in most country outside of the US. I don't really care for Parler but having big company abusing their position to have terms heavily in disadvantage of their client shouldn't be something we support. Because I guess most cloud-provider have the same type of clause.
Arbitration over litigation should be just plainly illegal.
The overall picture painted is that Internet access is widely self-regulated and limited by this complex network of AUPs, and that it is difficult or impossible for any single ISP or cloud provider to act independently and set their own terms. What do Hacker News people think? Is this true?
https://cloudpundit.com/2021/01/10/terms-of-service-from-ant...
They're not being censored, they're being inconvenienced.
No real reason was given (that we've seen so far) just "your services are being terminated."
Firearm hobbyists and owners expressed concern of this happening a while back and their fears became reality.
ar15.com is already back up on another host, but their base is at risk of becoming further radicalized over this.