As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states.

Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?

While I applaud Pirate Bay for the technological ingenuity that is not an counter example in anyway

The Pirate Bay is more or less a link register today after having been pushed to the point where they can not even sustain hosting torrent files, they can only host mag links.

This is far cry from running an actual platform or business on the internet.

How is it not a counterexample? TPB has user registration, submissions and comments, and a search function. Conceptually, this isn't too different to the function of Parler.

Also, the introduction of magnet links (or more generally, the DHT which those rely on) was a broadly positive move for the BitTorrent community, reducing reliance on centralized tracker servers.

It is divise and it will backfire. Soon there will have to be a separate everything for Republicans and Democrats.

Chances are that Trump is going to own a big part of it. That is why Trump is not on Gab or Parler, because he will compete with them.

He's either making his own or negotiating a piece of Gab or Parker, whichever gives him a bigger piece, to make them his platform of choice.

I think the issue is more that Trump, who is a highly divisive character, has become the face of the Republican party.

So people end up conflating the ostracism of Trump and those in his periphery with an attack on the Republican party.

Trump to this day has an approval rate of around 40%. That is a pretty large “periphery”. You can not just seperate him from the Republican party. They tried and failed.

It'll certainly be interesting to see what happens to the Republican party over the next few years, given that they've ended up tying themselves so strongly to Trump's cult of personality.

It appears as if they started distancing themselves as soon as he lost. There was always a contingent of "Never Trumpers". Politicians are fickle.

It will be interesting to see what happens, more so because I expect widespread disillusionment from Trump republicans.

> There was always a contingent of "Never Trumpers". Politicians are fickle.

Trump isn't really a Republican, it's just that on some key issues, his position aligns better with the Republican party. The majority of the Republican party was openly anti-Trump in the beginning, then later turned around due to his massive public support.

That hasn't really changed, his approval is as stable as ever. The only people buying into the "failed coup" narrative are the ones that never supported him to begin with. Dropping Trump, as much as the party might want to, is not a recipe for success. Strategically, dividing the Republican party will be the prime objective of Democrats.

Personally I think or rather hope this is a defining moment for both Democrat and Republicans,

It will really come down to what the Democrats do with their current turn in power, The republican party is clearly fractured, if the Democrats attempt to ram through sweeping social and economic changes that appeal to their most authoritarian left base then it will fracture the Democrat party as well

This could be, for the first time since the Wig Party collapsed, that we see an opening for an actual 3rd party to emerge

Even Pence has done some distancing. Probably a lot more after he realized that Trump's rhetoric resulted in an assassination attempt.

I think you are correct except it remains to be seen if the new alt-Internet is centralized or decentralized.

Except Twitter is for Republicans too. And many of them like Bill Kristol turned against Trump because of his behavior. Many that still support Trump have managed to stay on Twitter because they act responsibly.

The problem with Parker and Gab is that they are only for the problem users. In fact, in an interview with Kara Swisher the CEO said that they have panels of volunteers that judge whether a post should be removed. The blind leading the blind.

Republican is a political party, not a ideaology.

Bill Kristol is an Authoritarian, Pro-War, corporatist Republican that does not share much in way of ideology with many social conservatives in the Political party.

Bill Kristol is the type of Republican that turned me away from the Republican party

Bill Kristol is closer in political alignment with the Authoritarian Left, than he is with the Libertarian right which is why he is allowed to stay on Twitter.

Twitter is for Authoritarians / Totalitarians

Exercise of free market principles by platforms booting people/entities that violate their ToS isn't totalitarian.

This would be true if the ToS was applied evenly with out political bias

My reading of the situation is that Twitter etc. we're fine turning a (not very) blind eye until President Trump did something that is arguably illegal. At that point self-interest kicked in as they realized "oh crap since he did this with the help of our platform and we've been letting him violate our own rules we may have legal liability OMG ban!"

Heck, AWS hosts the National Enquirer, the publication that tried to blackmail AWS's owner with genital pics. It's difficult to claim anti-conservative bias when so much borderline and over the line extreme right content is allowed to remain.

If there's an appearance of conservative bias then I believe it is because between President Trump peddling conspiracy theories and general hatred of those who oppose him, it simply caused more extremist content to be posted, and therefore more to be banned. It's not bias is there really is a lot more extreme right content.