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I'm generally anti-regulation, but one potential consideration is to apply the same standards of eviction to cloud hosts as we do to landlords. I think we agre

I'm generally anti-regulation, but one potential consideration is to apply the same standards of eviction to cloud hosts as we do to landlords. I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations. Even if the landlord insists on a contract abrogating this, it's unenforceable. Policy restricts this because 1) landlords generally have very high negotiation power, and 2) tenants rarely read the fine print. It seems to me that both conditions are approximately true for the major cloud providers. If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. AWS/GCP/Gmail/iCloud could ban you as a customer, but only with 90 days notice. Otherwise, immediate eviction could only occur if it involved legally codified egregious behavior, and would require a court judgement. I think this would eliminate nightmare scenarios where somebody suddenly finds themselves locked out of their Google Drive and Gmail for some algorithmic mishap. But it would put very little operating burden on the cloud providers.

nine_k 6y ago
Suppose I buy 1000 VMs and use them to DDoS something. Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?
- malwarebytess 6y ago
  Kind of an easy question. What do you do if you find out a tenant is cooking drugs on your property? Same kind of thing is going to apply here. I imagine liability in either case is going to be a concern. I'm not worried for the huge hosts.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    For a tenant: You call the police and they maybe get arrested. They're still legally allowed to enter the property until you evict them, which takes 30 days or more in most jurisdictions. You might be able to start eviction proceedings. You eventually sue them for damage to the property. For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account. In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days. I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
    - malwarebytess 6y ago
      Seems compelling to me. The point is that both should operate in the same way, and can.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Does action in such a case rely on accusation or conviction? This is a question, not bait, because I don't know but I assume it would require conviction which takes time.
- capableweb 6y ago
  No, you're conflicting two different things. DDoS is obviously illegal as you're attacking someone else. The "forced to host a tenant that they object to" the other commentator is mentioning is regarding not liking their speech and ideas, not actions. Of course we should try to stop illegal activities that actively harm others. When it comes to Parler, it's unclear if Parler themselves were active in inciting the violence, just members who happened to be using Parler, or if they are related at all.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    So they are renters hosting a party on your property where people do illegal things.
- offby37years 6y ago
  DDoSing is already an illegal cybercrime in the US. A DDoS attack could be classified as a federal criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)[1]. Under Damaging a Computer, 1030(a)(5) > The provision may also be used to prosecute the perpetrators of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which occur, for example, when an attacker overwhelms a server’s ability to process legitimate requests by overloading the server with a flood of illegitimate traffic. [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46536.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46536.pdf
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bananabreakfast 6y ago
    Facilitating terrorism is also a crime and a far more serious one
    - nine_k 6y ago
      There's the catch: it takes a court ruling to declare someone a criminal.
  - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
    The question remains unanswered: should the cloud hosting company wait for a court judgement that deems the DDOSer guilty of a crime?
    - nytgop77 6y ago
      It should call the police.
      - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
        Ok, sure, it should call the police, and then what? Should it wait for the police to investigate and the court to judge?
bhawks 6y ago
This is extremely reasonable especially in light of the fact that cloud providers intentional attempt to lock customers into proprietary apis that are designed to be challenging to migrate across clouds.
gwright 6y ago
I think this is a form of what might be generally called "due process" -- something that is missing from many of the operational actions made by online platforms long before any of the recent incidents.
- cestith 6y ago
  AWS cancelling a contract is not a criminal sentence. This is a business contract dispute between two private companies, neither of which is a part of the government. AWS took an action under the contract accusing Parler of breach. Parler sued in civil court to get the dispute resolved. This is nothing like locking people in prison without a trial.
  - gwright 6y ago
    Who said it was like locking people in prison? Due process isn't some concept that is only applicable to government actions. IANAL, but I feel like contract law includes lots of elements of due process.
    - cestith 6y ago
      Due process is handled entirely differently in contract law than in criminal law. That's the damn point. Amazon cancelling the contract is entirely different from any situation in criminal law, where the state is already involved and the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt before one can act. Buying a cheeseburger is also a type of contract. Can you imagine McDonald's having to reserve a court date to kick someone out of their restaurant for disturbing the other customers?
richardARPANET 6y ago
AWS agreed to host Parler on a 1 year contract. They have just breached that contract and bowed to the mob. For those reasons they're now being sued.
- minhazm 6y ago
  The terms of the contract likely are just that AWS will give them their money back. Pretty much all contracts have some sort of clause to allow you to break it with some penalty.
- agar 6y ago
  Are you familiar enough with AWS contracts in general, and possibly the Parler contract specifically, to know they breached the contract? (Honest question, as you may be an employee of Parler, for example. HN is an interesting place). I ask because contracts typically, despite their duration, contain a variety of exit clauses. In this case, Amazon could argue they were exercising a "compliance with laws" clause (if it was in the agreement) such as, "<Licensee> will not use, or allow its products to be used, in violation of any laws or regulations." It becomes a legal argument as to whether Parler's members that advocated violence against the government caused Parler to violate the clause, and whether that amounts to a material breach that triggers contract termination. That is very different than a blanket statement that Amazon "breached that contract and bowed to the mob." In fact, Amazon can sue Parler for breaching the agreement and exposing Amazon to significant liability for (at the most extreme) aiding and abetting terrorism. Note that I'm not arguing either way, simply stating what lawyers are likely discussing behind the scenes.
  - osacial 6y ago
    >"compliance with laws" that is something that has to be proven in court, before playing any such cards If that is the case and you defend it, then this is a very unique situation, where law is not enforced by state institution, but by Google, Apple and Amazon. The question is what law? As clearly it is not US law. If there is breach to the law, then there should be article Nr of breached law, otherwise all of these arguments are nonsensical. Nowhere in the world - even in Saudi Arabia it is possible to be judged and sentenced by unwritten law - by nongovernmental entities. Otherwise it is unlawful lynching by mob and there are countries that allow those, but US kinda positioned themselves as a country that guarantees The Law. Now that guarantee does not work.
tw04 6y ago
>I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations. This is false equivalency. AWS didn't "arbitrarily" kick them out. If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts, a landlord can ABSOLUTELY evict you immediately in all sorts of states. https://www.arizonalandlord.net/immediate-eviction-action-in-arizona https://www.arizonalandlord.net/immediate-eviction-action-in... https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/missouri-eviction-process https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/missouri-eviction-proce... AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS. I think AWS can very easily make the argument that continuing to host Parler when they're allowing calls for violence would do significant harm to their business.
- Reedx 6y ago
  The whole thing is such a terrible, short-sighted justification. The logic being used is setting a precedent to ban or backdoor any encrypted non-moderated form of communication. e.g., Signal and Telegram.
  - bananabreakfast 6y ago
    That's an absurd jump to take. The subject is about a platform that is specifically moderated. This has nothing to do with non-moderated communication
    - bpodgursky 6y ago
      So... Parler is worse because there is _minimal_ moderation, but _no_ moderation is totally fine? That doesn't really seem consistent with any set of guiding principles.
Falling3 6y ago
> If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing I can't say I agree or that I find this analogy valid. Tenant eviction protection is, in part, to protect human life acknowledging the necessity of shelter. The same just doesn't apply to cloud computing.
- Shish2k 6y ago
  Logically I agree with you, but we’re living in a world where “corporations are people”, so...
- wegs 6y ago
  It's an analogy. None are perfect. But people need livelihoods to live. It's not okay or fair to destroy a business arbitrarily and capriciously. My lesson here is that the Internet is essential infrastructure, and once companies reach a certain size (Google, Facebook, AWS), they should be regulated similarly to public utilities. An electric company shouldn't be able to cut off electricity to a crack house or brothel unless law enforcement first asks for it. Law enforcement should have due process appropriate to the situation; a terrorist attack should be cut off right now. A company making pirated copies of Windows should have their day in court. Your propaganda-believing gun-toting drunk crazy uncle should probably keep their electricity (which isn't to say he shouldn't be handled somehow, but perhaps committed to a medical facility). I don't feel good or bad about them being taken off-line, since I don't actually know what they hosted. I do feel bad about that decision being made by corporations behind closed doors.
  - Falling3 6y ago
    > It's an analogy. None are perfect It's more than just an analogy when the parent comment claimed that if you support one, you should support the other. I'm not disagreeing that the scenarios aren't analogous. I'm disagreeing that the same logic that makes one of those things essential to a functioning society should be tried to be wedged in as an argument for the other.
  - lupire 6y ago
raldi 6y ago
Of course a landlord can throw you out on a moment's notice if your use of the property is illegal and presents a clear and present mortal danger to public safety.
- mattigames 6y ago
  Yep, on many states something as simple as doing drugs is enough to kick you out at a moments notice even if are making no damage to the property. A digital platform being used to orchestrate the destroying of government buildings as well as planning the kidnap of gov officials and making death threats should get more lenience? Get outta here.
  - kflzufkrbzi 6y ago
    So if amazon found any illegal messages on twitter they would be justified to shutdown twitter without notice?
    - bsenftner 6y ago
      "Illegal messages" such as the planning of a coordinated attack on anyone with the intent of killing and altering law? You're goddamned right!
    - mattigames 6y ago
      This wasn't one of the ways Parlor was being used, was the ONLY way it was being used, there were not thousands of scientists, mathematicians or people from all the politican spectrum like Twitter there, so any comparison with big social networks is misguided to put it mildly.
    - toofy 6y ago
      Twitter can make a good-faith argument they attempt to remove content that is questionable or that incites violence–they can point to millions of accounts and posts they’ve removed for those very reasons. The ceo of parler can not.
- aqsalose 6y ago
confidantlake 6y ago
Your landlord throwing you out of your apartment is not at all similar to AWS banning your account.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  They are very similar. Both situations leave you in a situation where you are unable to respond quickly enough and can cause massive financial damage. Just because the situations are not identical does not mean they are not similar and that rules from one can't be moved over to the other. I don't think google should be able to simply lock people out of their accounts and data without any notice for them to take their data out. I was hit by this personally when google docs locked on of the documents I was working on for school at a time I critically needed it. Their given reason was simply "tos violations" despite nothing in the document being a violation and they unlocked the document 2 days later.
  - kickopotomus 6y ago
    You do not have a right to a Google account. You do not have a right to force them to store your bits on their servers. They offer a free service which they may revoke at their discretion. If you do not like those terms, you are completely free to use any of the other free mail services out there or host your own mail server.
    - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
      I'm not saying I'm entitled to a google account, but I do think I should be entitled to fair warning that I am being kicked off. Google should be required to send me notice so I can get my data out and on to a competing platform. Like with rentals, they can deny me service at the start, but once they take me on to the platform, short of a gross abuse of the service, I should be entitled to a warning before the service is terminated.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    > They are very similar Very? Well, they are very different. And it's in those ways that they differ where the reasons for the tenant protections exist..
bsenftner 6y ago
> I'm generally anti-regulation... Tells us you don't understand the purpose of regulation. The entire premise that regulation is bad is a disinformation campaign against rational thought. Do you understand how regulation comes into existence? Regulation is the result of someone, some corporation, some city, some legal entity abusing the public's trust to the degree a law is enacted to oversee future such situations because the general public has proved it cannot self regulate this aspect of the public's trust.
- randallsquared 6y ago
  That is certainly the most optimistic version I've ever read of how regulation comes into existence. Nothing about this origin story rehabilitates regulations as a whole, however. Even if it were actually 100% true, it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad based on misunderstandings, the calculation problem, and other forms of unintended consequences. Clearly, there also exist examples of regulations enacted for less enlightened reasons.
  - bsenftner 6y ago
    The failure of our species to govern itself so laws are enacted is optimistic? You're statement that "it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad" is sheer lunacy. Are you listening to yourself? If I listened to your logic, I'd expect airplanes to be falling from the sky, computers are not possible, and the moon landed must be fake - because they is no way, the misunderstandings, the calculation problem, the unintended consequences... humbug.
abcdjdjd 6y ago
Sorry, but I think you are being highly disingenuous. An ACTUAL equivalency would be a phone company throwing you off their phone system, while colluding with other phone companies and tech companies (not even related to the phone service) to also simultaneously ban you from using their services. Also, this is clearly politically targeted, while using words that hide this. Otherwise, please explain to me how all of them just up and decided to do this at once? We as a society have said that is not ok for phone companies to do. Why are we making exceptions for what is now services that are holding a large portion, if not the majority, of online sites and services at this time? Also, what evidence has been presented of illegal activity on this app and proof they were not following Section 230 law and refusing to remove it? How were they handling things differently from Twitter (or any social media site for that matter), who also has these problems with their service, and why is Twitter still able to be up? No, I don't mean AWS claims they weren't doing it. I want to know actual evidence. If the post exists, their should be screenshots of them still up now, no? At this point, cloud services have gotten so large that they probably need to be regulated at this point as a public utility is. To say AWS is the same as a rental/tenant relationship is laughable. If it was, there would be millions of different cloud services one could go to and this would be a non-issue. But, it clearly isn't close to the same. Also, if illegal activity is being done (and this stuff was handled like a public utility, as frankly that is the size of these cloud services at this point), then that needs to be handled in a court of law.
- andrewprock 6y ago
  Except that the phone companies are regulated as common carriers, and cloud services are not regulated as common carriers.
  - abcdjdjd 6y ago
    HINTS why I said THEY SHOULD BE handled that way, did you read my post?
    - andrewprock 6y ago
      I did read your post. You did not explicitly mention regulating cloud services as common carriers. If your policy suggestion is to enact more regulation for cloud services, and to treat them as common carriers, then I think things are little more clear.
candybar 6y ago
You're citing protection for residential tenants - the rights for commercial tenants are generally limited to whatever they negotiated in the lease. And the protection for residential tenants isn't due to the difficulty of finding new accommodation, but the consequences of not finding new accommodation - homelessness. It's substantially harder for commercial tenants to find new space than for residential tenants, but they do not enjoy such protection as residential tenants, because the consequences - going out of business - are substantially less dire. Given that anyone losing access to AWS faces consequences more along the lines of a commercial tenant being evicted, rather than a residential tenant being evicted, this analogy does not work.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  It's even another level down from that. I haven't heard about their landlord kicking them out of whatever office they have. That would have its own real world knock-on effects like the storage of valuables and confidential material. Arguably web hosting is more important to Parler but that makes their lack of prior communication with their vendors like Amazon that much more inexplicable. There are (or were, last I checked) plenty of hosting providers that cater to controversial websites. They charge a premium for not doing this kind of thing. Seems like they tried to pinch pennies in the wrong place. It happens to everyone in business at some point.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  AWS, maybe, but for App / Play Store it's like only having two tenants in the whole Western world, and both have evicted you (though one of them allows you to put your tent in his garbage dump).
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Parler is pretty "homeless" where smartphones are concerned...
EGreg 6y ago
Landlords? Let's take one step back. Just like in the Title I vs Title II debate, let's go one step earlier. WHY do we have these issues in the first place? It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever. Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am. Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook. Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line. Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform. You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have? Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!
mr_toad 6y ago
90 days notice to spammers botnets and other undesirables? Ridiculous. Edit: utterly ridiculous. Imagine applying the same standards to other physical businesses. Image a bar not being able to evict an unruly patron without 90 days notice or a court order. This is frankly completely unworkable. And I think once the EU gets off their high horse they’ll find they have to accept that too.
ilikehurdles 6y ago
What the conservative media is reporting is happening to parler, and what actually is being alleged in the lawsuit are two very different worlds of events: https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/1349162165698252802?s=20 https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/134916216569825280... The stuff parler allegedly turned a blind eye to goes way beyond objectionable viewpoints and well into violating contracts.
staticassertion 6y ago
> If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. Nope. 1. Kicking a company off of a cloud platform is not putting someone on the street without notice. Companies are not people, clouds are not beds. 2. It's the company's responsibility to manage risk, including the risk of getting kicked off of a platform. Most companies manage this risk by minimizing it - it's extremely easy, and well trodden territory. Things most companies will do is moderate content, it's pretty much dead simple. If your company won't do those things you'll have to mitigate risk in some other way. 3. You might argue "well companies aren't people, clouds aren't beds, but workers will lose their jobs". This is true, if the company has been poorly managed. But we already have nets for those situations. There's bankruptcy, unemployment, various tax benefits, notice to apply for a new job, etc. I actually don't feel particularly compelled at all by your analogy.
richardw 6y ago
At least where I live, your home rental is far more protected than your business rental. It takes a lot to get you out of a house, definitely not a month’s notice under normal circumstances. It takes a normal breach of contract to lose your business rental.
mahdix 6y ago
"I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. " Can a confectionary refuse to sell cake to a gay couple just because they are gay?

nine_k 6y ago

Suppose I buy 1000 VMs and use them to DDoS something. Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?

malwarebytess 6y ago
Kind of an easy question. What do you do if you find out a tenant is cooking drugs on your property? Same kind of thing is going to apply here. I imagine liability in either case is going to be a concern. I'm not worried for the huge hosts.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  For a tenant: You call the police and they maybe get arrested. They're still legally allowed to enter the property until you evict them, which takes 30 days or more in most jurisdictions. You might be able to start eviction proceedings. You eventually sue them for damage to the property. For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account. In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days. I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
  - malwarebytess 6y ago
    Seems compelling to me. The point is that both should operate in the same way, and can.
- hnick 6y ago
  Does action in such a case rely on accusation or conviction? This is a question, not bait, because I don't know but I assume it would require conviction which takes time.
capableweb 6y ago
No, you're conflicting two different things. DDoS is obviously illegal as you're attacking someone else. The "forced to host a tenant that they object to" the other commentator is mentioning is regarding not liking their speech and ideas, not actions. Of course we should try to stop illegal activities that actively harm others. When it comes to Parler, it's unclear if Parler themselves were active in inciting the violence, just members who happened to be using Parler, or if they are related at all.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  So they are renters hosting a party on your property where people do illegal things.
offby37years 6y ago
DDoSing is already an illegal cybercrime in the US. A DDoS attack could be classified as a federal criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)[1]. Under Damaging a Computer, 1030(a)(5) > The provision may also be used to prosecute the perpetrators of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which occur, for example, when an attacker overwhelms a server’s ability to process legitimate requests by overloading the server with a flood of illegitimate traffic. [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46536.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46536.pdf
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  Facilitating terrorism is also a crime and a far more serious one
  - nine_k 6y ago
    There's the catch: it takes a court ruling to declare someone a criminal.
- baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  The question remains unanswered: should the cloud hosting company wait for a court judgement that deems the DDOSer guilty of a crime?
  - nytgop77 6y ago
    It should call the police.
    - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
      Ok, sure, it should call the police, and then what? Should it wait for the police to investigate and the court to judge?

bhawks 6y ago

This is extremely reasonable especially in light of the fact that cloud providers intentional attempt to lock customers into proprietary apis that are designed to be challenging to migrate across clouds.

gwright 6y ago

I think this is a form of what might be generally called "due process" -- something that is missing from many of the operational actions made by online platforms long before any of the recent incidents.

cestith 6y ago
AWS cancelling a contract is not a criminal sentence. This is a business contract dispute between two private companies, neither of which is a part of the government. AWS took an action under the contract accusing Parler of breach. Parler sued in civil court to get the dispute resolved. This is nothing like locking people in prison without a trial.
- gwright 6y ago
  Who said it was like locking people in prison? Due process isn't some concept that is only applicable to government actions. IANAL, but I feel like contract law includes lots of elements of due process.
  - cestith 6y ago
    Due process is handled entirely differently in contract law than in criminal law. That's the damn point. Amazon cancelling the contract is entirely different from any situation in criminal law, where the state is already involved and the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt before one can act. Buying a cheeseburger is also a type of contract. Can you imagine McDonald's having to reserve a court date to kick someone out of their restaurant for disturbing the other customers?

richardARPANET 6y ago

AWS agreed to host Parler on a 1 year contract. They have just breached that contract and bowed to the mob. For those reasons they're now being sued.

minhazm 6y ago
The terms of the contract likely are just that AWS will give them their money back. Pretty much all contracts have some sort of clause to allow you to break it with some penalty.
agar 6y ago
Are you familiar enough with AWS contracts in general, and possibly the Parler contract specifically, to know they breached the contract? (Honest question, as you may be an employee of Parler, for example. HN is an interesting place). I ask because contracts typically, despite their duration, contain a variety of exit clauses. In this case, Amazon could argue they were exercising a "compliance with laws" clause (if it was in the agreement) such as, "<Licensee> will not use, or allow its products to be used, in violation of any laws or regulations." It becomes a legal argument as to whether Parler's members that advocated violence against the government caused Parler to violate the clause, and whether that amounts to a material breach that triggers contract termination. That is very different than a blanket statement that Amazon "breached that contract and bowed to the mob." In fact, Amazon can sue Parler for breaching the agreement and exposing Amazon to significant liability for (at the most extreme) aiding and abetting terrorism. Note that I'm not arguing either way, simply stating what lawyers are likely discussing behind the scenes.
- osacial 6y ago
  >"compliance with laws" that is something that has to be proven in court, before playing any such cards If that is the case and you defend it, then this is a very unique situation, where law is not enforced by state institution, but by Google, Apple and Amazon. The question is what law? As clearly it is not US law. If there is breach to the law, then there should be article Nr of breached law, otherwise all of these arguments are nonsensical. Nowhere in the world - even in Saudi Arabia it is possible to be judged and sentenced by unwritten law - by nongovernmental entities. Otherwise it is unlawful lynching by mob and there are countries that allow those, but US kinda positioned themselves as a country that guarantees The Law. Now that guarantee does not work.

tw04 6y ago

>I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations. This is false equivalency. AWS didn't "arbitrarily" kick them out. If you are destroying the property you live in or using it to commit or facilitate illegal acts, a landlord can ABSOLUTELY evict you immediately in all sorts of states. https://www.arizonalandlord.net/immediate-eviction-action-in-arizona https://www.arizonalandlord.net/immediate-eviction-action-in... https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/missouri-eviction-process https://ipropertymanagement.com/laws/missouri-eviction-proce... AWS gave them the time agreed to in the contract to remove offending content and present a plan for continued moderation to prevent the same thing from happening a second time. They wouldn't even commit to moderating the speech Amazon told them was in violation of the TOS. I think AWS can very easily make the argument that continuing to host Parler when they're allowing calls for violence would do significant harm to their business.

Reedx 6y ago
The whole thing is such a terrible, short-sighted justification. The logic being used is setting a precedent to ban or backdoor any encrypted non-moderated form of communication. e.g., Signal and Telegram.
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  That's an absurd jump to take. The subject is about a platform that is specifically moderated. This has nothing to do with non-moderated communication
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    So... Parler is worse because there is _minimal_ moderation, but _no_ moderation is totally fine? That doesn't really seem consistent with any set of guiding principles.

Falling3 6y ago

> If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing I can't say I agree or that I find this analogy valid. Tenant eviction protection is, in part, to protect human life acknowledging the necessity of shelter. The same just doesn't apply to cloud computing.

Shish2k 6y ago
Logically I agree with you, but we’re living in a world where “corporations are people”, so...
wegs 6y ago
It's an analogy. None are perfect. But people need livelihoods to live. It's not okay or fair to destroy a business arbitrarily and capriciously. My lesson here is that the Internet is essential infrastructure, and once companies reach a certain size (Google, Facebook, AWS), they should be regulated similarly to public utilities. An electric company shouldn't be able to cut off electricity to a crack house or brothel unless law enforcement first asks for it. Law enforcement should have due process appropriate to the situation; a terrorist attack should be cut off right now. A company making pirated copies of Windows should have their day in court. Your propaganda-believing gun-toting drunk crazy uncle should probably keep their electricity (which isn't to say he shouldn't be handled somehow, but perhaps committed to a medical facility). I don't feel good or bad about them being taken off-line, since I don't actually know what they hosted. I do feel bad about that decision being made by corporations behind closed doors.
- Falling3 6y ago
  > It's an analogy. None are perfect It's more than just an analogy when the parent comment claimed that if you support one, you should support the other. I'm not disagreeing that the scenarios aren't analogous. I'm disagreeing that the same logic that makes one of those things essential to a functioning society should be tried to be wedged in as an argument for the other.
- lupire 6y ago

raldi 6y ago

Of course a landlord can throw you out on a moment's notice if your use of the property is illegal and presents a clear and present mortal danger to public safety.

mattigames 6y ago
Yep, on many states something as simple as doing drugs is enough to kick you out at a moments notice even if are making no damage to the property. A digital platform being used to orchestrate the destroying of government buildings as well as planning the kidnap of gov officials and making death threats should get more lenience? Get outta here.
- kflzufkrbzi 6y ago
  So if amazon found any illegal messages on twitter they would be justified to shutdown twitter without notice?
  - bsenftner 6y ago
    "Illegal messages" such as the planning of a coordinated attack on anyone with the intent of killing and altering law? You're goddamned right!
  - mattigames 6y ago
    This wasn't one of the ways Parlor was being used, was the ONLY way it was being used, there were not thousands of scientists, mathematicians or people from all the politican spectrum like Twitter there, so any comparison with big social networks is misguided to put it mildly.
  - toofy 6y ago
    Twitter can make a good-faith argument they attempt to remove content that is questionable or that incites violence–they can point to millions of accounts and posts they’ve removed for those very reasons. The ceo of parler can not.
aqsalose 6y ago

confidantlake 6y ago

Your landlord throwing you out of your apartment is not at all similar to AWS banning your account.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
They are very similar. Both situations leave you in a situation where you are unable to respond quickly enough and can cause massive financial damage. Just because the situations are not identical does not mean they are not similar and that rules from one can't be moved over to the other. I don't think google should be able to simply lock people out of their accounts and data without any notice for them to take their data out. I was hit by this personally when google docs locked on of the documents I was working on for school at a time I critically needed it. Their given reason was simply "tos violations" despite nothing in the document being a violation and they unlocked the document 2 days later.
- kickopotomus 6y ago
  You do not have a right to a Google account. You do not have a right to force them to store your bits on their servers. They offer a free service which they may revoke at their discretion. If you do not like those terms, you are completely free to use any of the other free mail services out there or host your own mail server.
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    I'm not saying I'm entitled to a google account, but I do think I should be entitled to fair warning that I am being kicked off. Google should be required to send me notice so I can get my data out and on to a competing platform. Like with rentals, they can deny me service at the start, but once they take me on to the platform, short of a gross abuse of the service, I should be entitled to a warning before the service is terminated.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  > They are very similar Very? Well, they are very different. And it's in those ways that they differ where the reasons for the tenant protections exist..

bsenftner 6y ago

> I'm generally anti-regulation... Tells us you don't understand the purpose of regulation. The entire premise that regulation is bad is a disinformation campaign against rational thought. Do you understand how regulation comes into existence? Regulation is the result of someone, some corporation, some city, some legal entity abusing the public's trust to the degree a law is enacted to oversee future such situations because the general public has proved it cannot self regulate this aspect of the public's trust.

randallsquared 6y ago
That is certainly the most optimistic version I've ever read of how regulation comes into existence. Nothing about this origin story rehabilitates regulations as a whole, however. Even if it were actually 100% true, it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad based on misunderstandings, the calculation problem, and other forms of unintended consequences. Clearly, there also exist examples of regulations enacted for less enlightened reasons.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  The failure of our species to govern itself so laws are enacted is optimistic? You're statement that "it would still be possible for most regulations to be bad" is sheer lunacy. Are you listening to yourself? If I listened to your logic, I'd expect airplanes to be falling from the sky, computers are not possible, and the moon landed must be fake - because they is no way, the misunderstandings, the calculation problem, the unintended consequences... humbug.

abcdjdjd 6y ago

Sorry, but I think you are being highly disingenuous. An ACTUAL equivalency would be a phone company throwing you off their phone system, while colluding with other phone companies and tech companies (not even related to the phone service) to also simultaneously ban you from using their services. Also, this is clearly politically targeted, while using words that hide this. Otherwise, please explain to me how all of them just up and decided to do this at once? We as a society have said that is not ok for phone companies to do. Why are we making exceptions for what is now services that are holding a large portion, if not the majority, of online sites and services at this time? Also, what evidence has been presented of illegal activity on this app and proof they were not following Section 230 law and refusing to remove it? How were they handling things differently from Twitter (or any social media site for that matter), who also has these problems with their service, and why is Twitter still able to be up? No, I don't mean AWS claims they weren't doing it. I want to know actual evidence. If the post exists, their should be screenshots of them still up now, no? At this point, cloud services have gotten so large that they probably need to be regulated at this point as a public utility is. To say AWS is the same as a rental/tenant relationship is laughable. If it was, there would be millions of different cloud services one could go to and this would be a non-issue. But, it clearly isn't close to the same. Also, if illegal activity is being done (and this stuff was handled like a public utility, as frankly that is the size of these cloud services at this point), then that needs to be handled in a court of law.

andrewprock 6y ago
Except that the phone companies are regulated as common carriers, and cloud services are not regulated as common carriers.
- abcdjdjd 6y ago
  HINTS why I said THEY SHOULD BE handled that way, did you read my post?
  - andrewprock 6y ago
    I did read your post. You did not explicitly mention regulating cloud services as common carriers. If your policy suggestion is to enact more regulation for cloud services, and to treat them as common carriers, then I think things are little more clear.

candybar 6y ago

You're citing protection for residential tenants - the rights for commercial tenants are generally limited to whatever they negotiated in the lease. And the protection for residential tenants isn't due to the difficulty of finding new accommodation, but the consequences of not finding new accommodation - homelessness. It's substantially harder for commercial tenants to find new space than for residential tenants, but they do not enjoy such protection as residential tenants, because the consequences - going out of business - are substantially less dire. Given that anyone losing access to AWS faces consequences more along the lines of a commercial tenant being evicted, rather than a residential tenant being evicted, this analogy does not work.

jrumbut 6y ago
It's even another level down from that. I haven't heard about their landlord kicking them out of whatever office they have. That would have its own real world knock-on effects like the storage of valuables and confidential material. Arguably web hosting is more important to Parler but that makes their lack of prior communication with their vendors like Amazon that much more inexplicable. There are (or were, last I checked) plenty of hosting providers that cater to controversial websites. They charge a premium for not doing this kind of thing. Seems like they tried to pinch pennies in the wrong place. It happens to everyone in business at some point.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
AWS, maybe, but for App / Play Store it's like only having two tenants in the whole Western world, and both have evicted you (though one of them allows you to put your tent in his garbage dump).
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Parler is pretty "homeless" where smartphones are concerned...

EGreg 6y ago

Landlords? Let's take one step back. Just like in the Title I vs Title II debate, let's go one step earlier. WHY do we have these issues in the first place? It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever. Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am. Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook. Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line. Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform. You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have? Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!

mr_toad 6y ago

90 days notice to spammers botnets and other undesirables? Ridiculous. Edit: utterly ridiculous. Imagine applying the same standards to other physical businesses. Image a bar not being able to evict an unruly patron without 90 days notice or a court order. This is frankly completely unworkable. And I think once the EU gets off their high horse they’ll find they have to accept that too.

ilikehurdles 6y ago

What the conservative media is reporting is happening to parler, and what actually is being alleged in the lawsuit are two very different worlds of events: https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/1349162165698252802?s=20 https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/134916216569825280... The stuff parler allegedly turned a blind eye to goes way beyond objectionable viewpoints and well into violating contracts.

staticassertion 6y ago

> If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. Nope. 1. Kicking a company off of a cloud platform is not putting someone on the street without notice. Companies are not people, clouds are not beds. 2. It's the company's responsibility to manage risk, including the risk of getting kicked off of a platform. Most companies manage this risk by minimizing it - it's extremely easy, and well trodden territory. Things most companies will do is moderate content, it's pretty much dead simple. If your company won't do those things you'll have to mitigate risk in some other way. 3. You might argue "well companies aren't people, clouds aren't beds, but workers will lose their jobs". This is true, if the company has been poorly managed. But we already have nets for those situations. There's bankruptcy, unemployment, various tax benefits, notice to apply for a new job, etc. I actually don't feel particularly compelled at all by your analogy.

richardw 6y ago

At least where I live, your home rental is far more protected than your business rental. It takes a lot to get you out of a house, definitely not a month’s notice under normal circumstances. It takes a normal breach of contract to lose your business rental.

mahdix 6y ago

"I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. " Can a confectionary refuse to sell cake to a gay couple just because they are gay?