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I'll admit the use of 'unilateral' here is probably poor, I don't know the proper one. These companies exert monopoly power in the markets they are in. Decision
by gfodor 6y ago
I'll admit the use of 'unilateral' here is probably poor, I don't know the proper one. These companies exert monopoly power in the markets they are in. Decisions made by companies which are monopolies are "unilateral-ist" because once a small number of them make a decision together (perhaps colluding) then it leaves no recourse for the person or group they are deciding against.
Mentioned elsewhere, the process we should all wants is one where if a company wants to nuke an entire speech platform like this due to illegal speech, they can get a judge to affirm the legality of the content and the negligence of those who are hosting it. With that in hand, their actions would be immune from criticism. Without it, we find ourselves here, where we basically have to trust them to make the right decision and not abuse their power. It's not what we should want, for the same reason that we should have wanted anti-trust laws in place to reduce the power of monopolists, despite the fact that monopolists were operating entirely legally and often ethically.
- JamesBarney 6y agoBanning content moderation unless you have a judge's order seems like it could be problematic. If this law existed could dang still ban people for people for being a-holes and not following site guidelines or would he need a court order?
- gfodor 6y agoI'm referring specifically to the situation where an entire service is going to be shut down, and silence many, many people who presumably were not doing anything illegal. At the risk of a stupid analogy, AWS have near-Death Star like capability at this point, so blowing up Alderaan in the name of killing a few people on it the local government seems unwilling to seems like it should have a few checks and balances.
- JamesBarney 6y agoSo just for hosting? If someone buys a rents a bunch of vms and use it to DDOS Amazon do they need a judges order then?
- vel0city 6y agoAWS has somewhere around 30% marketshare in a market with well more than dozens of players. I have a hard time seeing it as a monopoly.
- gfodor 6y agoI'm referring to monopoly power - which doesn't mean a singular entity. A good thought exercise to gauge this in this situation specifically is if it's only incidental that they were on AWS. If they were on Azure or GCP I think we can assume the same result would have occured.
- vel0city 6y agoGood thing there's still more than AWS, GCP, and Azure in the cloud hosting market. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies willing to rent you computing hardware on the internet. There are dozens if not hundreds of colocations willing to rent you space, power, and network connectivity.
- gfodor 6y agoFor now.