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A comment on Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support. Parent comment

Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by jmull on Monday January 11, 2021 @11:59AM (#25731756)
> Where on earth does the authority come from, which authorizes Amazon, ostensibly a private corporation, to arbitrate ANYTHING to do with public speech?

Where would the authority come from to force Amazon to support a message board they believe is for the purpose of inciting and organizing violent insurrection?

Why shouldn’t Amazon be able to make judgements about who it’s safe to do business with? Why should Parler’s decisions about who to do business with override Amazon’s?

Suppose Amazon did something Parler didn’t like, and as a result Parler decided to move to a different provider... should Parler be forced to stay with Amazon after all?

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Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by minimuffins on Monday January 11, 2021 @01:05PM (#25733010)
Yes. Legally probably no one did anything wrong. My claim is not that any party behaved inappropriately according to law or the ordinary norms of doing business. Amazon is "within its rights." No argument.

But if you look at this situation and don't see problems that are expanding beyond the ability of laissez faire contracts to account for (I'll be specific: it's the concentrated accumulation of communicative and cultural capital to a tiny number of minimally publicly accountable, opaque, private, exceedingly deep-pocketed firms), you're burying your head in the sand.

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