5 ms·

Let Amazon know we're boycotting them because of Wikileaks

25 points by adriaanb 16y ago

CPops 16y ago
You're free to boycott Amazon if you wish, but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand. What were they threatened with? More sales taxes? IRS audits? Yes, Amazon's response to this was really weak and cowardly, but let's not lose sight of who is the real villain in this case — Joe Lieberman and whatever other elements of the government are complicit in trying to shut down free speech. I'd rather boycott Washington D.C. than Amazon.
- bitbutter 16y ago
  "but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand." Whether it's true that to continue hosting Wikileaks would amount to martyrdom may depend on how widespread the support for Wikileaks is. This success or failure of this pledge campaign will give some indication of that. In any case, there's no question that pols are to blame. But for better or worse, I hold Amazon to a higher standard than I do politicians.
- araneae 16y ago
  It's not that I expected them to behave differently, I just prefer to give my money elsewhere where possible now. For instance, I am moving my wedding registry elsewhere, simply because I prefer not to give them the profit off of it since it can just as easily be given to other companies.
  - tybris 16y ago
    How do you know your new company wouldn't do the same thing in the same situation?
    - araneae 16y ago
      Well, they are generally in the making pottery or weaving sheets business, so I doubt it would come up.
Tichy 16y ago
I must admit, while I thought it a pity that Amazon took that step, I think their strong point is selling books and stuff, not politics. I can understand why hosting Wikileaks might have seemed too risky.
- adriaanb 16y ago
  They also sell books about politics, but it's about the AWS and Amazon selectively shutting down it's services towards clients.
  - endlessvoid94 16y ago
    Businesses toss clients and customers all the time when they become unmanageable or too costly (or a drain on them).
Umalu 16y ago
Amazon's choice: (1) host Wikileaks and risk getting shut down, or (2) drop Wikileaks, get boycotted. If choice (2) is as bad as choice (1), something I guess the boycotters hope for, then Amazon's choice is a Morton's fork: two equally bad outcomes. Why don't the boycotters stick their Morton's fork where it belongs: into those who wrote and enforce the laws they object to?
- rbarooah 16y ago
  Because Amazon does not appear to have been compelled by law, so there's no law to change - just a vague sense of not wanting to be on the wrong side of powerful people. This is how the mafia works. It shouldn't be how the government works.
  - jared314 16y ago
    The people at Amazon might not actually like Wikileaks or the PR it brings. The government might not have anything to do with it.
    - rbarooah 16y ago
      Except that we know that the government did contact Amazon and ask them to stop hosting wikileaks.
- adriaanb 16y ago
  I think a whole lot of people would react to 'those who wrote and enforce the laws' when scenario 1 was picked. Shutting down Amazon sounds a bit to extreme imo.
- jdp23 16y ago
  The goal is to make 2 worse than 1 so that future companies, when faced with similar government pressure, will make a different choice. As EFF says "Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon."
gte910h 16y ago
I actually think they did hurt themselves here: I now have to say to clients who I'd otherwise push towards their cloud services: "If you get a national politician unhappy with your product, they do have a history of pulling the plug on people, see wikileaks". While that's not a boycott, that is a move from a strong buy to a "consider other options if you have any chance of pissing someone off". I do think Joe Liberman single handedly handed cloud computing to non-american countries though with his stunt. Why base your cloud here when your company gets better data protection in :insert jurisdiction which doesn't give a crap about Joe Liberman's threats:
- tybris 16y ago
  They probably would have hurt themselves more by keeping wikileaks and becoming the center of attention during the Christmas period, receiving the fury of conservative America, and losing major government contracts.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    Amazon was screwed either way. This way however, they have compromised their cloud service's future (instead of their online retailer's present). It's not their fault they had to choose whom to piss off. They did however turn themselves from a whitebox solutions provider to a curated whitebox solutions provider though with this decision.
    - adriaanb 16y ago
      What do you think would happen if Amazon didn't shut down Wikileaks?
      - gte910h 16y ago
        A call on FoxNews to boycott them most likely.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
endlessvoid94 16y ago
The holiday season is here. Boycotting amazon isn't going to do a damn thing. The average consumer has no clue that amazon has anything to do with the tech industry. To most people it's just an online store.
- jdp23 16y ago
  The holiday season is the best possible time for a boycott of any retailer. Last-minute shopping hasn't happened yet, and for most people, there are good alternatives for most of what Amazon carries. More on why a boycott could have a big impact at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2201 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2201
  - endlessvoid94 16y ago
    Agreed. But I'm saying that the vast majority of Amazon's customers are not software developers. They're soccer moms, busy middle class honest workers who don't know a damn thing about AWS or even that Amazon had anything to do with wikileaks. They don't care. They'll buy from wherever is cheapest/most convenient.
    - jdp23 16y ago
      Well, it's not just software developers who are fired up about free speech but putting that aside more a moment... The soccer moms, teachers, honest workers, etc. in my and my SO's family would almost certainly honor our requests to "please don't get us anything via Amazon" -- especially if we give them alternative sources. Some of them would be interested enough in it that we'd discuss it and probably convince at least a few that this is a serious problem and they want to get involved. Most people have at least a few friends who are sympathetic; as people start posting about it on Facebook, others will see and at least a few will decide to get involved. Plus there are some family mailing lists (mostly used to exchange bad jokes) and people there tend to defer to my expertise on computer stuff. So we'll probably pick up a few more there ... And internationally, my guess is that feelings are a lot stronger. It's fascinating watching the discussion on Twitter -- there's so much in other languages. Initial momentum for a boycott seem strongest in Spain right now ... and no surprise, given the revelations in the cables. From abroad, it looks like an American company trying to censor the world's access to information, so I could imagine a boycott having a bit impact there.
tybris 16y ago
I'm not. If I objected to every company that ever did something morally questionable in the interest of their business I'd be naked, homeless and starve to death.
jambo 16y ago
HN readers might be interested to know that this site, The Point, is the basis for Groupon. http://www.groupon.com/about http://www.groupon.com/about
jasonkester 16y ago
Where do I click to let Amazon know that I'm not boycotting them? I mean really, Amazon is my favorite Big Company right now. They have all sorts of really cool services to make it easy for small businesses to do their thing. And every month or so they send me an email telling me that they just made one of those services cheaper. They also manage to stock every single item of anything that I've needed to buy online in the last several years, and are capable of getting it to me in 2 days without any hassle whatsoever. They do all the creepy user-tracking stuff that every other big company does, but somehow manage to pull it off in a way that is not only not creepy, but actually makes me happy. Hey, Amazon just told me about the new Black Keys album. That's something I might actually consider buying. Thanks Amazon! So yeah, no. I'm not planning to boycott them over some silly internet controversy that they didn't want anything to do with. Pick a better company like PayPal or eBay or Microsoft or Facebook or pretty much anybody and I'm with you. But lay off Amazon. They're cool.
- wmeredith 16y ago
  Right on the "Buy Now" button.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
thangalin 16y ago
Dear Amazon.com, WikiLeaks offered the government a chance to review the cables before they went online. They made the offer to ensure that the leaked documents would not jeopardize lives. The government declined. To date, no leaked documents by WikiLeaks have resulted in any harm coming to any individual. While the past cannot be used as a measure of the future, it does support the notion that such releases will likely cause intractable harm in reputation rather than flesh. Although WikiLeaks does not own the content, the scope of the content reveals a problem with the United States: that people in power are more corrupt than could otherwise have been known. If exposing truth and honesty while holding governments and corporations accountable to moral lessons of right and wrong is insufficient cause for Amazon.com to overlook its self-imposed terms of service, then the owners of Amazon.com have taken the moral low-ground. And I shall have nothing to do with them. This a complex issue, with many arguments on both sides, yet one fact remains: WikiLeaks has published Truth. And if Truth stirs trouble, then we, as a society, have failed. We have failed our peers. We have failed our governing. And we have failed our children. And now? I shall tell hundreds of friends.
- avner 16y ago
  The matter at hand transcends into international politics of the highest order. It is not some website that someone created to opine on their dissatisfaction with the government and hence were ordered to take it down. Its a website that hosted classified documents that don't belong to them, and were obtained illegally. No cognizant web-host in the US would want to host such content, if they want to remain in the business without an agenda. Amazon does not have to subscribe to some social contract that obligates them to submit to an organization like Wikileaks. As crass as it may sound, Amazon's in it for the money, not international politics. Your expectations from Amazon, while noble, unfortunately do not translate into what is practically tactical for Amazon from a business' point of view. Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality.
  - bitbutter 16y ago
    "Its a website that hosted classified documents that don't belong to them, and were obtained illegally. No cognizant web-host in the US would want to host such content" Of course they would, and you know they will. Or do you really believe that Amazon will refuse to carry any product, over the coming years, that quotes from the leaked documents that are already in the public domain? "As crass as it may sound, Amazon's in it for the money, not international politics." Of course, and that's why a boycott is an appropriate response from people who feel negatively towards their decision; to submit to political pressure, and selectively apply their terms of use rules. "Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality." I disagree. Whichever US host dropped wikileaks under these circumstances would have been a legitimate target for a boycott. Amazon faced a difficult decision for sure, but handled it exceptionally badly wrt maintaining customer trust. Had there been even a hint of contrition in their statement, I (and I'm guessing others) may have felt less animosity towards them.
DjDarkman 16y ago
The moral of this story: if you want to publish something embarrassing to politicians, do it somewhere were they can't abuse their power/influence.
- rbarooah 16y ago
  Where do you suggest?
pedalpete 16y ago
Like most hosting services, AWS has rules in there terms about what can be hosted. Agree with wikileaks or not, I think there is little debate that the documents were obtained illegally. Therefore, AWS was right to take them down from a business standpoint. I'll probably get downvoted for saying 'obtained illegally', but I'm talking about the guy who downloaded the docs, not the guy who posted them. I think the worst Wikileaks could be charged with would be purchasing stolen property.
Silhouette 16y ago
From the site, as I write this (an hour or so after this link was posted and hit the front page of HN): > Amazon should be made aware of the scale of public opposition to what they’ve done. > If we reach at least 1,000 people, then We will each mail Amazon letting them know why we won't be buying from them anymore. > 1%, 989 people to go If that's not irony, I don't know what is. In any case, I don't see the objection here. A lot of Internet warriors seem to be almost zealous in their support of Wikileaks and their belief that the various large-scale releases they have made recently are somehow changing the nature of society and making governments fundamentally more transparent. Wikileaks are quick to say that governments have not identified specific people hurt or killed because of the leaks. However, looking at things from a slightly more neutral point of view, it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect. They have created a lot of hype, disruption and embarrassment, but where's the huge smoking gun? I'm in the UK, and so far there has been commentary on our politicians as with many other places, but there's no evidence that our government ordered a hit on Dr David Kelly, or that Tony Blair had more information than we already knew from the public inquiries about whether Iraq really had WMDs, or that our then-government's support for the US action against a lot of popular opinion was a result of some corrupt deal for personal gain by the politicians calling the shots. Frankly, the leaks have so far been rather anti-climactic. Also, just as an aside, the whole "we offered to let the government help us vet the material" argument is just transparent politics. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of documents. To even try to vet that data in any useful depth, the time needed from security-cleared and fully informed officials, and the amount of taxpayers' money it would cost would be staggering. Please don't tell me Wikileaks weren't well aware of that. And that's without even getting into the "we don't negotiate with enemies" ethics. Given this sort of mess, I don't blame Amazon for not wanting any part of it. The fact that Wikileaks and various embarrassed government officials are having a very public pissing match is not a reason for independent businesses to start taking sides. More pragmatically, given the aforementioned lack of any real substance in the leaks, it is highly likely that the governments are going to win this one, and no business on the scale of Amazon wants to be out of favour with major national governments. There just isn't anything in it for them.
- adriaanb 16y ago
boringuser 16y ago
Put yourself in Bezos' shoes. If hosting WikiLeaks could potentially make you the victim of DDOS attacks, cause you bad PR, open you to lawsuits, give you trouble with the government, etc, etc, would you really put your company, its employees, everything you have worked for at risk to support this political activism, even if you did believe in it? It's easy enough to say what you think Amazon should do, but if you were the one making the decision it might be more difficult than you imagine.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
stevederico 16y ago
Fun sidenote: the source of this article (thepoint.com) was andrew mason's first startup attempt and later the idea was spun into Groupon. He spoke about it at Startup School, I am sure many people already know this, but I thought there might be a few that didn't. Anyways here is the link: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180613 http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180613
to 16y ago
i would reject everyone and everything of the official sites that go against wikileaks. like the icann will possibly at some point or paypal for cutting of donations or twitter if they ever kill the wikileaks account but amazon is a hoster that was getting ddos'ed. every normal hoster wouldve dropped your page if you harm their business others pay a lot of money for in some cases.

25 points by adriaanb 16y ago

CPops 16y ago

You're free to boycott Amazon if you wish, but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand. What were they threatened with? More sales taxes? IRS audits? Yes, Amazon's response to this was really weak and cowardly, but let's not lose sight of who is the real villain in this case — Joe Lieberman and whatever other elements of the government are complicit in trying to shut down free speech. I'd rather boycott Washington D.C. than Amazon.

bitbutter 16y ago
"but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand." Whether it's true that to continue hosting Wikileaks would amount to martyrdom may depend on how widespread the support for Wikileaks is. This success or failure of this pledge campaign will give some indication of that. In any case, there's no question that pols are to blame. But for better or worse, I hold Amazon to a higher standard than I do politicians.
araneae 16y ago
It's not that I expected them to behave differently, I just prefer to give my money elsewhere where possible now. For instance, I am moving my wedding registry elsewhere, simply because I prefer not to give them the profit off of it since it can just as easily be given to other companies.
- tybris 16y ago
  How do you know your new company wouldn't do the same thing in the same situation?
  - araneae 16y ago
    Well, they are generally in the making pottery or weaving sheets business, so I doubt it would come up.

Tichy 16y ago

I must admit, while I thought it a pity that Amazon took that step, I think their strong point is selling books and stuff, not politics. I can understand why hosting Wikileaks might have seemed too risky.

adriaanb 16y ago
They also sell books about politics, but it's about the AWS and Amazon selectively shutting down it's services towards clients.
- endlessvoid94 16y ago
  Businesses toss clients and customers all the time when they become unmanageable or too costly (or a drain on them).

Umalu 16y ago

Amazon's choice: (1) host Wikileaks and risk getting shut down, or (2) drop Wikileaks, get boycotted. If choice (2) is as bad as choice (1), something I guess the boycotters hope for, then Amazon's choice is a Morton's fork: two equally bad outcomes. Why don't the boycotters stick their Morton's fork where it belongs: into those who wrote and enforce the laws they object to?

rbarooah 16y ago
Because Amazon does not appear to have been compelled by law, so there's no law to change - just a vague sense of not wanting to be on the wrong side of powerful people. This is how the mafia works. It shouldn't be how the government works.
- jared314 16y ago
  The people at Amazon might not actually like Wikileaks or the PR it brings. The government might not have anything to do with it.
  - rbarooah 16y ago
    Except that we know that the government did contact Amazon and ask them to stop hosting wikileaks.
adriaanb 16y ago
I think a whole lot of people would react to 'those who wrote and enforce the laws' when scenario 1 was picked. Shutting down Amazon sounds a bit to extreme imo.
jdp23 16y ago
The goal is to make 2 worse than 1 so that future companies, when faced with similar government pressure, will make a different choice. As EFF says "Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon."

gte910h 16y ago

I actually think they did hurt themselves here: I now have to say to clients who I'd otherwise push towards their cloud services: "If you get a national politician unhappy with your product, they do have a history of pulling the plug on people, see wikileaks". While that's not a boycott, that is a move from a strong buy to a "consider other options if you have any chance of pissing someone off". I do think Joe Liberman single handedly handed cloud computing to non-american countries though with his stunt. Why base your cloud here when your company gets better data protection in :insert jurisdiction which doesn't give a crap about Joe Liberman's threats:

tybris 16y ago
They probably would have hurt themselves more by keeping wikileaks and becoming the center of attention during the Christmas period, receiving the fury of conservative America, and losing major government contracts.
- gte910h 16y ago
  Amazon was screwed either way. This way however, they have compromised their cloud service's future (instead of their online retailer's present). It's not their fault they had to choose whom to piss off. They did however turn themselves from a whitebox solutions provider to a curated whitebox solutions provider though with this decision.
  - adriaanb 16y ago
    What do you think would happen if Amazon didn't shut down Wikileaks?
    - gte910h 16y ago
      A call on FoxNews to boycott them most likely.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

endlessvoid94 16y ago

The holiday season is here. Boycotting amazon isn't going to do a damn thing. The average consumer has no clue that amazon has anything to do with the tech industry. To most people it's just an online store.

jdp23 16y ago
The holiday season is the best possible time for a boycott of any retailer. Last-minute shopping hasn't happened yet, and for most people, there are good alternatives for most of what Amazon carries. More on why a boycott could have a big impact at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2201 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2201
- endlessvoid94 16y ago
  Agreed. But I'm saying that the vast majority of Amazon's customers are not software developers. They're soccer moms, busy middle class honest workers who don't know a damn thing about AWS or even that Amazon had anything to do with wikileaks. They don't care. They'll buy from wherever is cheapest/most convenient.
  - jdp23 16y ago
    Well, it's not just software developers who are fired up about free speech but putting that aside more a moment... The soccer moms, teachers, honest workers, etc. in my and my SO's family would almost certainly honor our requests to "please don't get us anything via Amazon" -- especially if we give them alternative sources. Some of them would be interested enough in it that we'd discuss it and probably convince at least a few that this is a serious problem and they want to get involved. Most people have at least a few friends who are sympathetic; as people start posting about it on Facebook, others will see and at least a few will decide to get involved. Plus there are some family mailing lists (mostly used to exchange bad jokes) and people there tend to defer to my expertise on computer stuff. So we'll probably pick up a few more there ... And internationally, my guess is that feelings are a lot stronger. It's fascinating watching the discussion on Twitter -- there's so much in other languages. Initial momentum for a boycott seem strongest in Spain right now ... and no surprise, given the revelations in the cables. From abroad, it looks like an American company trying to censor the world's access to information, so I could imagine a boycott having a bit impact there.

tybris 16y ago

I'm not. If I objected to every company that ever did something morally questionable in the interest of their business I'd be naked, homeless and starve to death.

jambo 16y ago

HN readers might be interested to know that this site, The Point, is the basis for Groupon. http://www.groupon.com/about http://www.groupon.com/about

jasonkester 16y ago

Where do I click to let Amazon know that I'm not boycotting them? I mean really, Amazon is my favorite Big Company right now. They have all sorts of really cool services to make it easy for small businesses to do their thing. And every month or so they send me an email telling me that they just made one of those services cheaper. They also manage to stock every single item of anything that I've needed to buy online in the last several years, and are capable of getting it to me in 2 days without any hassle whatsoever. They do all the creepy user-tracking stuff that every other big company does, but somehow manage to pull it off in a way that is not only not creepy, but actually makes me happy. Hey, Amazon just told me about the new Black Keys album. That's something I might actually consider buying. Thanks Amazon! So yeah, no. I'm not planning to boycott them over some silly internet controversy that they didn't want anything to do with. Pick a better company like PayPal or eBay or Microsoft or Facebook or pretty much anybody and I'm with you. But lay off Amazon. They're cool.

wmeredith 16y ago
Right on the "Buy Now" button.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

thangalin 16y ago

Dear Amazon.com, WikiLeaks offered the government a chance to review the cables before they went online. They made the offer to ensure that the leaked documents would not jeopardize lives. The government declined. To date, no leaked documents by WikiLeaks have resulted in any harm coming to any individual. While the past cannot be used as a measure of the future, it does support the notion that such releases will likely cause intractable harm in reputation rather than flesh. Although WikiLeaks does not own the content, the scope of the content reveals a problem with the United States: that people in power are more corrupt than could otherwise have been known. If exposing truth and honesty while holding governments and corporations accountable to moral lessons of right and wrong is insufficient cause for Amazon.com to overlook its self-imposed terms of service, then the owners of Amazon.com have taken the moral low-ground. And I shall have nothing to do with them. This a complex issue, with many arguments on both sides, yet one fact remains: WikiLeaks has published Truth. And if Truth stirs trouble, then we, as a society, have failed. We have failed our peers. We have failed our governing. And we have failed our children. And now? I shall tell hundreds of friends.

avner 16y ago
The matter at hand transcends into international politics of the highest order. It is not some website that someone created to opine on their dissatisfaction with the government and hence were ordered to take it down. Its a website that hosted classified documents that don't belong to them, and were obtained illegally. No cognizant web-host in the US would want to host such content, if they want to remain in the business without an agenda. Amazon does not have to subscribe to some social contract that obligates them to submit to an organization like Wikileaks. As crass as it may sound, Amazon's in it for the money, not international politics. Your expectations from Amazon, while noble, unfortunately do not translate into what is practically tactical for Amazon from a business' point of view. Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality.
- bitbutter 16y ago
  "Its a website that hosted classified documents that don't belong to them, and were obtained illegally. No cognizant web-host in the US would want to host such content" Of course they would, and you know they will. Or do you really believe that Amazon will refuse to carry any product, over the coming years, that quotes from the leaked documents that are already in the public domain? "As crass as it may sound, Amazon's in it for the money, not international politics." Of course, and that's why a boycott is an appropriate response from people who feel negatively towards their decision; to submit to political pressure, and selectively apply their terms of use rules. "Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality." I disagree. Whichever US host dropped wikileaks under these circumstances would have been a legitimate target for a boycott. Amazon faced a difficult decision for sure, but handled it exceptionally badly wrt maintaining customer trust. Had there been even a hint of contrition in their statement, I (and I'm guessing others) may have felt less animosity towards them.

DjDarkman 16y ago

The moral of this story: if you want to publish something embarrassing to politicians, do it somewhere were they can't abuse their power/influence.

rbarooah 16y ago
Where do you suggest?

pedalpete 16y ago

Like most hosting services, AWS has rules in there terms about what can be hosted. Agree with wikileaks or not, I think there is little debate that the documents were obtained illegally. Therefore, AWS was right to take them down from a business standpoint. I'll probably get downvoted for saying 'obtained illegally', but I'm talking about the guy who downloaded the docs, not the guy who posted them. I think the worst Wikileaks could be charged with would be purchasing stolen property.

Silhouette 16y ago

From the site, as I write this (an hour or so after this link was posted and hit the front page of HN): > Amazon should be made aware of the scale of public opposition to what they’ve done. > If we reach at least 1,000 people, then We will each mail Amazon letting them know why we won't be buying from them anymore. > 1%, 989 people to go If that's not irony, I don't know what is. In any case, I don't see the objection here. A lot of Internet warriors seem to be almost zealous in their support of Wikileaks and their belief that the various large-scale releases they have made recently are somehow changing the nature of society and making governments fundamentally more transparent. Wikileaks are quick to say that governments have not identified specific people hurt or killed because of the leaks. However, looking at things from a slightly more neutral point of view, it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect. They have created a lot of hype, disruption and embarrassment, but where's the huge smoking gun? I'm in the UK, and so far there has been commentary on our politicians as with many other places, but there's no evidence that our government ordered a hit on Dr David Kelly, or that Tony Blair had more information than we already knew from the public inquiries about whether Iraq really had WMDs, or that our then-government's support for the US action against a lot of popular opinion was a result of some corrupt deal for personal gain by the politicians calling the shots. Frankly, the leaks have so far been rather anti-climactic. Also, just as an aside, the whole "we offered to let the government help us vet the material" argument is just transparent politics. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of documents. To even try to vet that data in any useful depth, the time needed from security-cleared and fully informed officials, and the amount of taxpayers' money it would cost would be staggering. Please don't tell me Wikileaks weren't well aware of that. And that's without even getting into the "we don't negotiate with enemies" ethics. Given this sort of mess, I don't blame Amazon for not wanting any part of it. The fact that Wikileaks and various embarrassed government officials are having a very public pissing match is not a reason for independent businesses to start taking sides. More pragmatically, given the aforementioned lack of any real substance in the leaks, it is highly likely that the governments are going to win this one, and no business on the scale of Amazon wants to be out of favour with major national governments. There just isn't anything in it for them.

adriaanb 16y ago

boringuser 16y ago

Put yourself in Bezos' shoes. If hosting WikiLeaks could potentially make you the victim of DDOS attacks, cause you bad PR, open you to lawsuits, give you trouble with the government, etc, etc, would you really put your company, its employees, everything you have worked for at risk to support this political activism, even if you did believe in it? It's easy enough to say what you think Amazon should do, but if you were the one making the decision it might be more difficult than you imagine.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

stevederico 16y ago

Fun sidenote: the source of this article (thepoint.com) was andrew mason's first startup attempt and later the idea was spun into Groupon. He spoke about it at Startup School, I am sure many people already know this, but I thought there might be a few that didn't. Anyways here is the link: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180613 http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180613

to 16y ago

i would reject everyone and everything of the official sites that go against wikileaks. like the icann will possibly at some point or paypal for cutting of donations or twitter if they ever kill the wikileaks account but amazon is a hoster that was getting ddos'ed. every normal hoster wouldve dropped your page if you harm their business others pay a lot of money for in some cases.