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Parler social network sues Amazon for pulling support

127 points by tomerbd 6y ago

NetOpWibby 6y ago
Lol, good luck with that. Free speech has a price. Private companies don’t owe you anything, especially if you exist to spreads malaise. I’ve been having a good laugh at Parler folk and their sympathizers.
- cynoclast 6y ago
  Yes, the price is the blood of tyrants.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  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.
  - adrr 6y ago
    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.
    - azangru 6y ago
      > 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.
      - adrr 6y ago
        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?
    - NetOpWibby 6y ago
      EDIT: Just reread your comment and I agree.
  - NetOpWibby 6y ago
    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.
- peytn 6y ago
  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.
- refurb 6y ago
  Private companies don’t owe you anything 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-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-11-mn-1358-s...
  - NetOpWibby 6y ago
    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.
    - refurb 6y ago
      You’re saying old cases don’t matter? You realize that the court system works on precedent, right?
- dazc 6y ago
  Will you be laughing when Big Tech don't get the payback they're hoping for and start playing against your side instead?
  - NetOpWibby 6y ago
    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.
    - dazc 6y ago
      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.
      - NetOpWibby 6y ago
        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.
cbg0 6y ago
Already discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25733038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25733038
npunt 6y ago
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.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I can recommend this movie - The People vs. Larry Flint. Things tend to repeat itself. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117318/ 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.
  - npunt 6y ago
    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.
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  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.
  - npunt 6y ago
    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.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    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.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
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.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  > the least controversial 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.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    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.
    - listenallyall 6y ago
      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.
meerita 6y ago
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.
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  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.
  - meerita 6y ago
    Same in Parler. I can't believe Parler doesn't ban any account who breaks the their Terms and Conditions
    - threeseed 6y ago
      Can you provide evidence of this moderation ? 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=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgBxXcAAuTkC?format=jpg&name=...
  - loremipsium 6y ago
    >If you see something objectionable on Twitter, report it. It will be addressed. And as we all know twitter applies their community guidelines equally on all its users regardless of their political stance.
    - cycrutchfield 6y ago
cudgy 6y ago
Basically, a link to the lawsuit and a tired recap of preceding events. Here is a link to the lawsuit https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/1/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/1/parler-llc-v...
f430 6y ago
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.
- vkou 6y ago
  > I think they have a case here, proving parler is exclusively for violence is massive overreach. Fortunately, Amazon does not need to prove that it is exclusively for violence.
  - f430 6y ago
    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.
    - vkou 6y ago
      > 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.
threatofrain 6y ago
It’s notable that per the CEO of Parker, law firms, banks and payment providers, mail and texting services have also cancelled on them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway19937 6y ago
  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.
runawaybottle 6y ago
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?
- sverhagen 6y ago
  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?
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
kstenerud 6y ago
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’
- waihtis 6y ago
  No crisis should go to waste. 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.
  - yulaow 6y ago
    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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bzb6 6y ago
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.
flojo 6y ago
You cant tell me AWS didn't expect or predict this. They had their lawyers ready, waaayy before they pulled the plug. They should have tried another route. thepiratebay is still operating.
- klodolph 6y ago
  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.
  - azangru 6y ago
    > as far as I can tell it hasn’t gotten new content since 2014 It sure has.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      It’s still on Cloudflare, though.
vmception 6y ago
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.
- gerikson 6y ago
  This spent 5 hours on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25729088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25729088
  - vmception 6y ago
    thanks, I was looking for that kind of thread
- nodamage 6y ago
  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.
narcissismo 6y ago
Are they the snowflakes now? Things move so fast these days.
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  The winds of regret must've kicked up.
andr 6y ago
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.
godmode2019 6y ago
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.
kjksf 6y ago
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.
- maeln 6y ago
  > 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.
- thewindowmovie5 6y ago
  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.
kennu 6y ago
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? https://cloudpundit.com/2021/01/10/terms-of-service-from-anti-spam-to-content-takedown/ https://cloudpundit.com/2021/01/10/terms-of-service-from-ant...
throwaway69123 6y ago
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
piercebot 6y ago
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.
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  Ding ding ding!
cosmiccatnap 6y ago
xkcd.com/1357/
borplk 6y ago
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.
- jrnichols 6y ago
  Collateral damage was yesterday too when Godaddy abruptly terminated services for ar15.com, which is a firearm related forum. 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.

127 points by tomerbd 6y ago

Lol, good luck with that. Free speech has a price. Private companies don’t owe you anything, especially if you exist to spreads malaise. I’ve been having a good laugh at Parler folk and their sympathizers.

cynoclast 6y ago
Yes, the price is the blood of tyrants.
throwaway3699 6y ago
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.
- adrr 6y ago
  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.
  - azangru 6y ago
    > 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.
    - adrr 6y ago
      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?
  - NetOpWibby 6y ago
    EDIT: Just reread your comment and I agree.
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  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.
peytn 6y ago
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.
refurb 6y ago
Private companies don’t owe you anything 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-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-11-mn-1358-s...
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  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.
  - refurb 6y ago
    You’re saying old cases don’t matter? You realize that the court system works on precedent, right?
dazc 6y ago
Will you be laughing when Big Tech don't get the payback they're hoping for and start playing against your side instead?
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  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.
  - dazc 6y ago
    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.
    - NetOpWibby 6y ago
      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.

cbg0 6y ago

Already discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25733038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25733038

npunt 6y ago

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.

inglor_cz 6y ago
I can recommend this movie - The People vs. Larry Flint. Things tend to repeat itself. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117318/ 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.
- npunt 6y ago
  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.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
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.
- npunt 6y ago
  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.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  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.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

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.

listenallyall 6y ago
> the least controversial 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.
- threeseed 6y ago
  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.
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    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.

meerita 6y ago

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.

cycrutchfield 6y ago
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.
- meerita 6y ago
  Same in Parler. I can't believe Parler doesn't ban any account who breaks the their Terms and Conditions
  - threeseed 6y ago
    Can you provide evidence of this moderation ? 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=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErTzgBxXcAAuTkC?format=jpg&name=...
- loremipsium 6y ago
  >If you see something objectionable on Twitter, report it. It will be addressed. And as we all know twitter applies their community guidelines equally on all its users regardless of their political stance.
  - cycrutchfield 6y ago

cudgy 6y ago

Basically, a link to the lawsuit and a tired recap of preceding events. Here is a link to the lawsuit https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/1/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/1/parler-llc-v...

f430 6y ago

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.

vkou 6y ago
> I think they have a case here, proving parler is exclusively for violence is massive overreach. Fortunately, Amazon does not need to prove that it is exclusively for violence.
- f430 6y ago
  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.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > 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.

threatofrain 6y ago

It’s notable that per the CEO of Parker, law firms, banks and payment providers, mail and texting services have also cancelled on them.

deleted 6y ago
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throwaway19937 6y ago
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.

runawaybottle 6y ago

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?

sverhagen 6y ago
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?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

kstenerud 6y ago

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’

waihtis 6y ago
No crisis should go to waste. 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.
- yulaow 6y ago
  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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bzb6 6y ago

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.

flojo 6y ago

You cant tell me AWS didn't expect or predict this. They had their lawyers ready, waaayy before they pulled the plug. They should have tried another route. thepiratebay is still operating.

klodolph 6y ago
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.
- azangru 6y ago
  > as far as I can tell it hasn’t gotten new content since 2014 It sure has.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    It’s still on Cloudflare, though.

vmception 6y ago

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.

gerikson 6y ago
This spent 5 hours on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25729088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25729088
- vmception 6y ago
  thanks, I was looking for that kind of thread
nodamage 6y ago
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.

narcissismo 6y ago

Are they the snowflakes now? Things move so fast these days.

NetOpWibby 6y ago
The winds of regret must've kicked up.

andr 6y ago

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.

godmode2019 6y ago

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.

kjksf 6y ago

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.

maeln 6y ago
> 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.
thewindowmovie5 6y ago
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.

kennu 6y ago

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? https://cloudpundit.com/2021/01/10/terms-of-service-from-anti-spam-to-content-takedown/ https://cloudpundit.com/2021/01/10/terms-of-service-from-ant...

throwaway69123 6y ago

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

piercebot 6y ago

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.

NetOpWibby 6y ago
Ding ding ding!

cosmiccatnap 6y ago

xkcd.com/1357/

borplk 6y ago

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.

jrnichols 6y ago
Collateral damage was yesterday too when Godaddy abruptly terminated services for ar15.com, which is a firearm related forum. 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.