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Parler’s management and funders were the architects of their own demise. They were – like most Libertarians – arrogant and lazy and entitled. They tried to fast-track themselves to corner the social networking space for the far right by cutting corners when it came to infrastructure and security and by tying themselves to closed proprietary apps.
However, these Galtian geniuses didn’t plan for what might happen if their aggressively stupid user base took advantage of their totally unmoderated platform to do the inevitable and plan an insurrection that might endanger the profits of existing monopolists like Apple and Google and Amazon – corporations they foolishly thought would be their allies. And now all they can is run and whinge to the bad ol’ state, which is not in a mood to give them the time of day.
If they’d developed their own hosting infrastructure, if they’d put money toward proper security, if they’d situated it in either a friendly jurisdiction (like Russia) or a lawless one (like Nigeria), if they’d used a federated and decentralised FOSS platform, they might still be chugging away today. But wannabe monopolists don’t have time for such things.
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No, it really isn’t.
I have signed more of these I can count, and reviewed more agreements than I can remember, including for organizations as big as the WMF, and I guarantee you they all say in them that they can terminate immediately if they feel your use of the service may cause harm to AWS. Being associated with a site that hosted a seditious assault on the government of the USA, while simultaneously refusing to ban users walking around using the hashtag #6mwe (6 million wasn’t enough) is more than enough grounds to say the risk of boycott or other harm in-market was too great. IANAL, but IMHO there is zero chance Amazon’s legal department didn’t make a determination along these lines prior to the action being taken.
Parler doesn’t have a leg to stand on here.
In fact, took me all of a minute to find that clause. I recognized it immediately, every AUP has one of these:
6.1 Generally. We may suspend your or any End User’s right to access or use any portion or all of the Service Offerings immediately upon notice to you if we determine:
(a) your or an End User’s use of the Service Offerings (i) poses a security risk to the Service Offerings or any third party, (ii) could adversely impact our systems, the Service Offerings or the systems or Content of any other AWS customer, (iii) could subject us, our affiliates, or any third party to liability, or (iv) could be fraudulent;
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That’s fair. I’m less worried now that they’ll win this.
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Service providers are really good at giving themselves get-out-of-agreement-free cards. 
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Honestly, i wasn’t intending to say it in bad faith, it completely slipped my mind that there’s a very good argument there that they’re endangering amazon directly. Didn’t even think about that, even though it was completely obvious.
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Mod note:
I removed a “Twitter/FB are just as bad” defence from this topic. I’ll link to what I wrote above about that:
There are very many conservative voices still on Facebook and Twitter. However, far less of them are engaging in Illegal speech (speech that is not protected and you can go to jail for) because the Twitters and Facebooks of the world have a moderation system to take this stuff down.
Parler could have implemented this, but instead they chose to allow Illegal speech to remain on their platform along with all these conservative voices. They were deplatformed because of this illegal speech, not because of the conservative voices on the platform.
This was not “political voices” that were “disagreed with” - this was calls for the execution of the Vice President of the United States by verified influencers on the platform that no action was taken against. This was the hashtag #6mwe (6 million wasn’t enough) trending on the platform with no actions taken to restrict it.
Monsterous bigots post everywhere. That’s not what’s at issue here. What’s at issue is what Parler would do (or not do) about it, and Boing Boing has posted more than enough stories about the heavy-handed levels of censorship FB/Twitter/Youtube employ that trying to make the argument that they are as willing to leave hate speech up as Parler was is a failure to research the source material at best, bad faith at worst.
Parler did this to themselves.
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parler.com is still resolving to 0.0.0.0. So much for their claims of 12h of downtime to get going again. 40h and counting.
Honestly, I won’t be surprised if it’s over and they’re permanently dead.
Counter-precedent: 8chan had months of downtime after losing their hosting in 2019. So… We’ll see.
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I mean, they said more recently it was going to be “a while, maybe weeks”
EDIT:
My suspicion was they were thinking 12 hours of downtime and were going to go to another cloud provider… and then that provider said no
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Not to mention that providing material support to terrorists could adversely affect Amazon and its business
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There is no way this is true. Bare metal doesn’t get you portability.
I think he means IaaS, but that doesn’t automatically mean you are portable. Someone who really has their shit together can maybe build based off portability, picking cloud neutral IaC and CaC solutions.
Having used Parler, I am not of the opinion they have their shit together to that extent.
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Proving the value of a good DHT.
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After a neo-Nazi podcast network began using its service after being booted by another host in 2019, Epik CEO Rob Monster told VICE News that the company “allows lawful free speech” and that it welcomed “all views, without bias or preference.”
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Terms of service are a contract. Just because you weren’t given a chance to negotiate the terms doesn’t change that.
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The part that really makes no sense to me is: If you’re going to host a site supporting “free speech”, presumably someone in management has hosted things on the internet before - which means you know that there will be legal challenges since you are pushing boundaries here.
Any CTO/COO worth their salt in this situation should say, from the beginning: “Hey, so, because we’re going to fight for free speech, there’s a good chance we will butt up against Acceptable Use Policies or other corporations that have differing views about this. So, from the beginning, let’s design to be portable - don’t rely on specific cloud features, and make sure we have a clear DR plan so that we can come up again on everything from VM’s to container services. Yes, this will be more expensive and less efficient, but it’s also necessary if we are at risk of legal issues”.
This clearly didn’t happen.
Then, Gab, their closest competitor in terms of legal liability and mission manages to get turfed, more than once, from their platforms. At that point, even if your COO/CTO hadn’t made the statement above, surely at this point they say “Ok, What happened to Gab could happen to us. We need to not let that take us offline. Let’s restrict our use of SaaS or proprietary systems so we aren’t fucked if we lose vendors like Gab did”.
But again, clearly, this didn’t happen.
As I’ve said, it’s Parler’s own fault they are offline in the first place, but it’s also Parler’s _lack of technical management expertise" that has resulted in them staying offline, not the boycott per se. Peter Kolmisoppi is completely correct here.
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Expanded: Since their site is mostly a view into a distributed hash table, as long as the DHT is healthy (a cloud owned by no one particular person or organization), they can continually respawn sites for the authorities with play whack-a-mole with.
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And before Gab there was all the legal challenges to the chans. I highly doubt their board has never heard of any of these sites before, it’s almost like it was intended to be a temporary source of investor capital that strip-mined the users for what their worth.
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