What a store can’t do (at least in the US), is say, “we won’t let you shop here because your skin color is this, or you’re from this part of town, or you practice this religion, or are this sexual orientation.” Now, if a person who matches one of those descriptions and chooses to violate rules and screams at people in the middle of the store, they can be denied service for that reason, just not on the basis of their race or religion, etc.
Parler violated AWS’s terms of service. I’m not going to be obtuse pretend that the type of political ideology that Parler actively seeks out/evangelizes/caters to, doesn’t make them a target, of course it does. That doesn’t negate the fact that the TOS was violated and there was no real plan of action from excising content that violated Amazon’s TOS from the platform. (Although I want to be clear, getting a bunch of conservative celebrities and Fox News hosts on your platform as a way to try to buy respectability doesn’t mean that the rhetoric extolled by Parler CEO and championed by the service is mainstream or even mainstream conservative. Parler was/is a place that was not about free speech but about pro-Trump speech; dissenters were banned from the service, which is Parler’s right, but it was hardly a “free speech” platform.)
Again, I’m not arguing Parler doesn’t have the right to exist. But I am arguing that AWS shouldn’t be obligated to host it. I’m also arguing that as big as AWS and the other clouds are, they are not yet at the point of being true pieces of immovable infrastructure. And honestly, I hope they never are. Even those of us who don’t shed any tears for Parler, probably agree that we don’t want to live in a world where the only options for hosting a website or app belong to a FAANG.
If it were an issue of an ISP or a backhaul provider denying access to the service, I would be the very first person criticizing and standing up to the action. But that’s not what happened here. Someone came into a store without shoes, without a shirt, without a mask, screaming in the face of the employees and other customers. They aren’t allowed to shop at that store anymore. But a store that might be a little further away is still an option.
If anything, we should be more bothered that people consider something like AWS or any of the other major clouds, core infrastructure akin to backhaul or electricity. (Google Play and the App Store have always had very clear TOS rules that limit certain types of content so I don’t even see them as being part of the discussion.)
I fundamentally agree that something like Parler, as abhorrent as much of its content was, has the right to exist somewhere on the internet, but I just as fundamentally disagree that Amazon should be forced to provide them with services or that we should equate having a right to exist with “having the right to exist on X’s brand of compute.”