In terms of the printing press analogy, they were renting printing presses that Amazon owned (because setting up printing presses is expensive). And Amazon said "you're printing too many 'kill all the redheads' flyers, so we're not renting to you anymore". (The printing analogy does break down if Parler also ends up being denied renting physical space in a datacenter.)

I appreciate the eli5, but Amazon said:

"We have a clause in your contract that says you shouldnt print 'kill all the x' and you're letting just about anyone print those. We can still rent you servers if you put a content-filtering team into effect"

But Parler didn't.

Amazon could probably argue that reputation damage offset their bills.

Risks of reputation damage cannot be allowed to override contract law. Instead, they should be able to just point to the contract and tell the deplatforming mob that they have to abide by it.

Otherwise, no contract will be worth the paper it is written on if a mob can just scream on Twitter and get a perfectly legal site taken down on very short notice. I'd be very hesitant to sign a contract with any company that doesn't include extremely high termination fees that would be sufficient to find a new host.

The reputation damage came from removing a platform, not from hosting it

My opinion of Amazon went up ever so slightly by removing Parler.

It should have done it a while ago (violent rhetoric didn't just pop up on there last week), but better late than never.

Both, depending on which side of the aisle you're asking.

This is probably a case where the amount charged didn’t represent the true cost to Amazon, however.

There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless. It's much simpler to just not do business with them than it is to try and develop a pricing model that accounts for those things.

The problem with your statement is that it is subjective. Amazon removing Parler hurt them from my subjective view a lot more than hosting them. I will never host anything on AWS since I know I could get removed at any time because of political reasons.

I am sure Amazon hosts a lot of sites that I don't agree with but that doesn't mean I will hold them accountable. It is simply stupid.

If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did (at least if you compare equal shitty places like Twitter), hold Parler accountable and not Amazon for hosting them.

Don't be part of the angry mob. Be smarter.

>I will never host anything on AWS since I know I could get removed at any time because of political reasons.

>If you think Parler did something wrong, which I don't think they did

Political reasons?!

They didn't do anything wrong?!

Parler was knowingly and willingly hosting content that was glorifying and inciting actual physical, deadly violence. Calls to skin politicians and their families are okay with you?!

Nowhere that I know of protected that kind of thing as free expression.

It's not political speech. It left the realm of political speech a long time ago.

I said zero of the things you seem to be ascribing to me or assuming of me.

Let me rephrase: "Parler paid its bills" is missing several variables in the equation.

Do not read into it any further than that.

Actually, you did.

> There may not be an obvious monetary cost to the negative publicity, legal and other costs Parler was and would incur for Amazon, but they're costs nonetheless.

What negative publicity do you mean if not political ones from one specific point of view? For me, parler did nothing other than offer an alternative to twitter which is equal shitty.

Amazon didn't have any publicity regarding this matter until they decided, together with a lot of other megacorps to remove everything associated with parler. Now they have had a lot of publicity, which is in my view very negative since now everyone knows that if you want to host anything that support any other viewpoint than those held by american megacorps you can be removed.

I have a hard time understanding how anyone can think this is good publicity.

> Don't be part of the angry mob. Be smarter.

At no point did I express agreement with any of these things. That is what you seem to be finding in my speech that's not there. I thought explicitly clarifying might help.

Trying to read into more than what's written and using that as a basis to tell me to "be smarter" is unnecessarily rude.

My mistake for opening up a vaguely political thread on HN, I'm out.

I think you did tho, while not directly you did so indirectly by claiming that Parler had more costs than what they were billed.

It just doesn't make sense, unless you believe Parler is bad in some kind of way and the only way they could've been bad is political.

> It just doesn't make sense, unless you believe Parler is bad in some kind of way and the only way they could've been bad is political.

Not the previous commenter, but Parler absolutely did commit wrongdoing, and that wrongdoing was absolutely not political. Calls for murder and violent insurrection are not political statements!

Did parler the company call out for murder and violent insurrection?

Do twitter call our for #killallmen when that hashtag is trending?

Your double standards are so very obvious.

That's completely irrelevant to what the issue here is though. AWS, as a private enterprise, is under no duty to sell its services to anybody.

AWS works on a consumption model, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the customer also have reservations with AWS for resources covering at least the next few months. Whether AWS can terminate the supply of services depend entirely on the service agreement. IIRC, AWS has a number of options of terminating a user's services in its service agreement, such as abuse of service, which hosting content inciting seditious violence most likely falls under.

> AWS, as a private enterprise, is under no duty to sell its services to anybody.

This may well be the legal position, but I think people are wondering whether it should be this way.

The first electricity providers were (I think, mostly) likewise completely private & free to sell or not as they pleased. But as they grew, and our dependence on their product grew, the rules changed. They are now regulated differently, and have to sell to all who pay their bills. And nobody thinks it a stain on ConEd's reputation when they are found to have been selling power to porn-studios or gun-makers (i.e. legal activities some find distasteful), nor to weed-growers or mafia-run warehouses (illegal activities, but we don't expect ConEd to hire deeply investigate every connection).

Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses? Or something more like a cable TV service, where they bear some responsibility for what's communicated in the channels being provided?

This.

It is always good to recall history. The origin of antitrust laws lies in the late 19th century, when a lot of railroad companies consolidated into a few mammoths. Back then, there were basically no regulations around the use of railroads, which were built by private capital.

Nevertheless, railroads became an important infrastructure of the nation, and the convergence of power towards just a few hands meant that the situation became untenable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._Uni...

I can see the parallels to the digital giants of today fairly well.

That's antitrust or competition law. However, no matter how you slice it, court would be unlikely to rule AWS as a monopoly given its market share in cloud hosting and even if you focus in on specific services, AWS market share is small by antitrust standards.

Amazon (the webstore) on the other hand is getting close, and with the core business of the other FAANGs.

Antitrust laws can be also broken by collusion. If, for example, AWS, Azure and Google can be demonstrated to act as a cartel (IDK if this is true, but if...), then they violate antitrust law, because in combination, they dominate the market.

>Is AWS selling something like water & electricity, a basic neutral service needed for many businesses?

This is what I find so disturbing about the Parler fiasco. Every tech person I know has interacted with AWS directly at some point. Everyone any of us knows has interacted with something reliant on AWS. What's the percentage of web services that run on AWS now? It's well over a third IIRC. AWS is essentially indispensable at this point. It might very well be called a technological utility.

Moreover AWS's core market has, historically, been startups. Parler, being a startup, was in their core group of customers, dealing with a service that had effectively become ubiquitous among startups. They were an American company, with a CEO and investors and users and capital.

Being a B2B service, bordering on a technological utility, rather than a B2C online community like Facebook or Twitter, the idea of AWS banning users seems almost a category error. The idea of AWS banning an American startup would have been unthinkable to me before it happened.

EDIT: Moved some phrases around for clarity.

But they sell the service and then stop providing it.

I hope you like it when the grocery store refuses to sell you food when they don’t like your political views.

Didn't this already happened with the bakery that refused to make a cake for a same sex couple?

https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bakersfield-bakery-own...

I think the argument in such cases is that making a custom cake celebrating something is (in part) an artistic creation, a kind of speech, and (you can argue) should not be compelled.

Whereas a grocery store refusing to sell things off the shelf to some group of people would be a very different matter.

(To be clear, I'm not taking any position on the particular cake case linked. There are many & details differ.)

Additionally, there is a large and highly competitive market for baking cakes, so you can just drive down the street. With enough cake shops, someone's almost certainly going to take your order.

The law currently only protects against certain types of discrimination, but high competition protects against all of them (assuming there isn't collusion).

Good point