7 ms·

If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice? That’s a lot of power. The boot is coming down ha

If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice? That’s a lot of power. The boot is coming down hard right now. The cloud is looking like a risky bet.

adrr 6y ago
As a business we only do business with vendors that don’t host controversial sites due to risk from boycotts and negative press. I picked AWS because it was a safe choice because of actions like kicking off Parler.
- mech422 6y ago
  not to pick on you... but customers like you are probably why AWS is taking the position they are. They don't want to risk other customers just to keep parler. That actually sounds like something a profit motivated company would do.... no conspiracies required. edit: should probably note, customers/advertisers have boycotted companies before for having a whiff of scandal around them..
  - adrr 6y ago
    Sendgrid is a good example. We moved to mandrill because we don’t want any drama with our vendors. Sendgrid was ddosed over some drama with their evangelist and it affected our business. Last thing I want to do is having to explain to my exec team that our emails aren’t going out because of a vendor choice I made.
    - mech422 6y ago
      Yeah - I vaguely remember that. And this economy is not the time to take unnecessary risks with your livelihood.
- listless 6y ago
  This is a good point and I agree with it. The market will sort this out better than we could with regulation. I do think that some may see this is a reason to go back to their own data center. It's also a reason why some content creators moved off Patreon to their own subscription services. Although to rebut my own point, that doesn't seem to have affected Patreon much at all.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blhack 6y ago
"The cloud" is irrelevant to this. Get your own servers -> datacenter won't host them Get your own datacenters -> no bandwidth providers will connect you Make your own ISP/bandwidth provider -> nobody will peer with you
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Maybe. And yet, North Korea and Iran both have Internet access and I can access a site like http://naenara.com.kp/ http://naenara.com.kp/ from the USA. I suppose there are also TOR hidden services and the like, although that's difficult to scale and maintain full anonymity.
- listless 6y ago
  That may very well happen. But the equal and opposite response here would be to setup your own infrastructure. We may very well see a "soft secession" as we have left providers and right providers and then we began to geographically locate ourselves around these providers.
dcolkitt 6y ago
It seems like there's at the very least a product-market fit for a cloud provider with less nebulous TOS. From the wording of the AWS contract, it sounds like the language is loose enough that any user can pretty much be terminated at whim. If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them. Amazon's probably counting on the fact that 99% of its customers' business doesn't have anything to do with politics, and therefore they'll write off the threat. But the counterpoint is that cancel culture has become so pervasive into people's personal lives that who knows what might happen. If an executive shows up to a Trump-rally or posts a politically incorrect meme on his personal time, it's not outside the scope of possibility that AWS/GCP could demand that the company fire the person or else have their account terminated. The zeigeist is increasingly moving to the ideology that "silence is violence". Are companies, like Coinbase, that espouse political neutrality next? Any company can now find itself on the wrong end of a cancel culture mob. If said mob has controls over your cloud providers TOS, then that's a major business risk.
- acdha 6y ago
  > If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them. Do you really think there are “a lot” of companies which host user content, refuse to moderate it, and refuse to deal with complaints forwarded by their service provider? Most C-level people are going to look at this and say “that's why we follow our contracts” or “I'm glad we don't have to worry about legal action against a rogue customer potentially impacting any infrastructure we share with them”.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    The question is what constitutes "refusal to moderate". As far as I can tell, simply calling the election fraudulent is grounds for banning on all the major platforms. To be clear, I don't believe that position, but at least 30 million Americans do. So now any company that hosts user content without the will or resources to censor the opinions held by one fifth of the electorate, can find its infrastructure turned off at the drop of hat. As a CEO, that would seem like unacceptable TOS to me.
ceejayoz 6y ago
> If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice? Yes, I do, because otherwise I'm gonna be on a blacklisted IP range because every spammer in the world signed up for the "you've got 30 days to do whatever you like every time you create a new account with a stolen credit card" hosting provider.

adrr 6y ago

As a business we only do business with vendors that don’t host controversial sites due to risk from boycotts and negative press. I picked AWS because it was a safe choice because of actions like kicking off Parler.

mech422 6y ago
not to pick on you... but customers like you are probably why AWS is taking the position they are. They don't want to risk other customers just to keep parler. That actually sounds like something a profit motivated company would do.... no conspiracies required. edit: should probably note, customers/advertisers have boycotted companies before for having a whiff of scandal around them..
- adrr 6y ago
  Sendgrid is a good example. We moved to mandrill because we don’t want any drama with our vendors. Sendgrid was ddosed over some drama with their evangelist and it affected our business. Last thing I want to do is having to explain to my exec team that our emails aren’t going out because of a vendor choice I made.
  - mech422 6y ago
    Yeah - I vaguely remember that. And this economy is not the time to take unnecessary risks with your livelihood.
listless 6y ago
This is a good point and I agree with it. The market will sort this out better than we could with regulation. I do think that some may see this is a reason to go back to their own data center. It's also a reason why some content creators moved off Patreon to their own subscription services. Although to rebut my own point, that doesn't seem to have affected Patreon much at all.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

blhack 6y ago

"The cloud" is irrelevant to this. Get your own servers -> datacenter won't host them Get your own datacenters -> no bandwidth providers will connect you Make your own ISP/bandwidth provider -> nobody will peer with you

alasdair_ 6y ago
Maybe. And yet, North Korea and Iran both have Internet access and I can access a site like http://naenara.com.kp/ http://naenara.com.kp/ from the USA. I suppose there are also TOR hidden services and the like, although that's difficult to scale and maintain full anonymity.
listless 6y ago
That may very well happen. But the equal and opposite response here would be to setup your own infrastructure. We may very well see a "soft secession" as we have left providers and right providers and then we began to geographically locate ourselves around these providers.

dcolkitt 6y ago

It seems like there's at the very least a product-market fit for a cloud provider with less nebulous TOS. From the wording of the AWS contract, it sounds like the language is loose enough that any user can pretty much be terminated at whim. If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them. Amazon's probably counting on the fact that 99% of its customers' business doesn't have anything to do with politics, and therefore they'll write off the threat. But the counterpoint is that cancel culture has become so pervasive into people's personal lives that who knows what might happen. If an executive shows up to a Trump-rally or posts a politically incorrect meme on his personal time, it's not outside the scope of possibility that AWS/GCP could demand that the company fire the person or else have their account terminated. The zeigeist is increasingly moving to the ideology that "silence is violence". Are companies, like Coinbase, that espouse political neutrality next? Any company can now find itself on the wrong end of a cancel culture mob. If said mob has controls over your cloud providers TOS, then that's a major business risk.

acdha 6y ago
> If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them. Do you really think there are “a lot” of companies which host user content, refuse to moderate it, and refuse to deal with complaints forwarded by their service provider? Most C-level people are going to look at this and say “that's why we follow our contracts” or “I'm glad we don't have to worry about legal action against a rogue customer potentially impacting any infrastructure we share with them”.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  The question is what constitutes "refusal to moderate". As far as I can tell, simply calling the election fraudulent is grounds for banning on all the major platforms. To be clear, I don't believe that position, but at least 30 million Americans do. So now any company that hosts user content without the will or resources to censor the opinions held by one fifth of the electorate, can find its infrastructure turned off at the drop of hat. As a CEO, that would seem like unacceptable TOS to me.

ceejayoz 6y ago

> If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice? Yes, I do, because otherwise I'm gonna be on a blacklisted IP range because every spammer in the world signed up for the "you've got 30 days to do whatever you like every time you create a new account with a stolen credit card" hosting provider.