Only until their ISP decides to do the same thing Amazon did (or buckles under the DDoS attacks that will happen). Or their registrar or DNS provider, assuming you don't consider domains optional too.
8chan was shut down by Cloudflare, Tucows, Voxility and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan#August_2019_removal_from...
I'm surprised these sites haven't been disconnected at the BGP level yet; maybe that will happen this year.
This is no morale debate anymore your choice is life or death. As a German I think about 1923 the attempted beer house coup in Munich and the lax response to Adolf Hitler and can only shake my heads at people like you.
At least I hope your sentiment comes from a high morale standpoint and not from misdirection as so many are in these threads.
I want neither options and behold the screams of people like yourself this is unprecedented that we the people or companies have the power to surpress calls for violence and sedition from a government working on a coup to stop the will of their own people. I am glad that we try it with whatever will come of it because we know from history what will happen if we do not.
If you look at the media outlets left and right they decided to pull trump of the air for much less and we don't see even fox, oan or other right wing media giving him a platform. 90% of the censorship calls are one-sided as well I see no one screaming about parler or thedonald.win banning progressive politicians or users on sight. your bias shows and it's abhorrent.
Yeah.. we know. Nobody is arguing that they can’t do it. Only that they shouldn’t.
It’s a fun straw man though
The internet as it exists for many people all over the world does not always include control over ports, or even a static IP address. Even if you do have a static IP you'll still need to go through a company to register a domain.
And as far as I know there's nothing stopping an ISP from refusing service, which could be coordinated just like this app store removal.
If Amazon said they wouldn't tolerate anyone who supported BLM because of the numerous riots and deaths caused by the movement would we this be okay? It's worth remembering that 50 years ago Amazon would probably morally object to hosting people who were pro-LGBT too.
The point of free speech is to protect those with unpopular opinions. This is because the default human response has always been to do the opposite. For years the science and arts were suppressed by people who just thought they were doing the right thing. As a civilization we have learnt from this mistake. Companies with global monopoly should not be empowered or encouraged to repeat it.
“people can just send letters i fully support att not allowing group X to use their phone lines to spread info.”
They have special legal obligations to, within reason, facilitate every legal transaction that comes their way. The scenarios you describe therefore cannot happen with them.
If you want internet platforms to have that same level of "anything goes", then you're arguing for them to be classified as common carriers.
I'm not sure how I feel about it though. A "commons" physical space has has an firm upper limit on how many people it can reach.
I don't think anyone is entitled to the massive amplification of their words that a large social media platform can provide without recourse to either being moderated or curated the way other broadcast media is done. A person could not perform some analog to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" on those traditional media forms, and I don't see how doing it on the internet should change that.
The problem as always is where do you draw the line? Some free speech advocates seem to say it's too difficult so we shouldn't try. That one reasonable step could be the justification for an unreasonable one. I think that's a complete cop out. I think you do the reasonable thing, and then fight against the unreasonable thing. Not give up because it's not easy. It's a hard thing and we need to constantly as a whole and in individual circumstances assess our judgements, but not back away from making them.
That setup works just fine, often to serve significantly higher amounts of traffic than you could afford at any regular hoster, too.
Look at the anarchist network setup at chaos camps, serving 100Gbps+ in the middle of rural nowhere, from server racks set up in chemical toilets, powered by geenerators and solar panels.
It’s not impossible to have the entirety of their community communicate solely via Signal, WhatsApp or iMessage. Or any theoretically equivalent end-to-end encrypted messaging app where the “message group” is the entirety of the current Parler community.
Apple, FB or anyone else, have no way to separate those users from others.
Of course, one could argue that Apple & Google could institute new policies to prevent the spread of misinformation on apps. But nobody can argue that it is a definitively more difficult problem to solve than on a user-content based, server-driven social network such as Twitter.
WhatsApp has implemented feature such as limited forwarding to combat misinformation.
But still they haven’t (and technically cannot) prevent Parler users from expressing their views.
In other words, I don’t see any instance of Parler users losing their right to free speech anywhere. Sure, they don’t enjoy the luxury of _convenience_ driven speech. But depending on how you define it, none of us have universally convenient means to express our speech.
Twitter, FB, AWS, Google eventually came along and said “ok, you want to share your ideas or host a community, we can make that really easy with our tools and platforms!” You can post what you want without worrying about servers in your basement. But in exchange for that convenience you have to accept that they reserve the right to terminate the contract at any time. They should not be required to help you promote ideas that they deem harmful or toxic.
So Parler can go back to how we used to do things in the 90s...it’s a little harder but not that hard. No one is being censored. This is simply a few companies deciding to terminate a relationship with one of their clients.