> there's the fact that AWS doesn't host Twitter's feed
This is funny (as in, LOL funny) to point out because it makes parler seem completely inept, but it's only technically correct.
They just negotiated a fat contract to host twitter, and that's set to go live in the next few months. Can that really not be considered an endorsement of twitter's content with respect to AWS' ToS? It's not like twitter just signed up for an AWS account like the rest of us do. There was a bidding and negotiation process. Sales teams on both sides worked on that contract. I don't think it's so unreasonable to take the existence of that contract as evidence that AWS reviewed twitter's content and deemed it acceptable content.
Why does this matter? Legally, I don't think it does. I don't see any good reason why AWS shouldn't be allowed to selectively enforce their ToS.
But Parler sought to compete directly with twitter. At the time of account termination, they were growing at a rate of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of users per day, and in a way where it's not hard to imagine it being zero-sum (twitter users terminating their accounts and going to parler).
I don't think the case would succeed, but I do think that parler can make an interesting case about AWS picking a winner and damaging a loser.
This is one of the cases where technically correct is actually the best kind of correct, because it goes directly to Parler’s claim that Twitter is a similar situated entity hosted on AWS being treated differently.
> They just negotiated a fat contract to host twitter, and that’s set to go live in the next few months. Can that really not be considered an endorsement of twitter’s content with respect to AWS’ ToS?
Um, no?
(1) Because if Twitter is under the standard TOS, they’ll be subject to the same reactive enforcement and quick cancellation as anyone else. Bringing someone on on those terms simply means you have the same trust as you’d extend to a random member of the public that they won’t break your TOS.
(2) Since they just “negotiated a fat contract”, they may or may not even be under the same TOS as are offered to people who just want to pick up hosting without negotiation. Which would be even farther from an endorsement of their content adhering to the general TOS.
> I do think that parler can make an interesting case about AWS picking a winner and damaging a loser.
Its possible that they could do so in the abstract, but they have made an argument along those lines, and its pretty clear that that concrete argument, as opposed to any hypothetical one they could have made, was, in the context of the particular evidence they’ve profferred to support it, unconvincing to the judge.
Twitter was literally closing accounts and deleting tweets that called for violence during that summer. There was quite a lot of complaining where twitter done it in ambiguous situations. Twitter was not perfect. But twitter was definitely at least trying. Twitter would not had issue to delete clear calls for violence that Amazon would point to them for weeks - the way Parler acted.
The fact is, it is simply not true that twitter would be acting as parler regarding censorship of calls for violence. In fact, it is a lie.
Parler did not done even token pretend you are trying to effort. Literally only issue here is that you dont care about left wing radicals being censored, which is fine, but then you pretend it does not happen which is not fine.
Amazon did not required perfection from Parler. Amazon is taking down Parler, because Parler did not even pretended to care about the issue. They have not done even token effort. Amazon is not taking down Parler for few bad message Parler did missed or were ambiguous.
Instead, Parler refused to take down messages Amazon pointed at few weeks ago. If Amazon sends twitter similar messages and twitter will ignore the Amazon for weeks or will respond with "we cant take them down, impossible", then it would be the same. That did not happened.
Why Parler? There are lots of other social media platforms out there using AWS with the same kind of rhetoric so that's not a good explanation or reason.
Now
Why did someone decide for that specific case and not the numerous others by ex. Twitter that are still there.
Picking on the little guy just because they are little seems to be a pretty questionable move.
1.) Twitter was not there and is not there yet. They will be there tho.
2.) Twitter was literally closing accounts and deleting tweets that called for violence. There was quite a lot of complaining where twitter done it in ambiguous situations. Twitter was not perfect. But twitter was definitely at least trying. Twitter would not had issue to delete clear calls for violence that Amazon would point to them for weeks - the way Parler acted.
The fact is, it is simply not true that twitter would be acting as parler regarding censorship of calls for violence. In fact, it is a lie.
Parler did not done even token pretend you are trying to effort. Twitter does much more then that.
3.) Parler is not little guy, they have Mercer money.
Am I getting your argument right?
Parler was the most gratuitous because:
1. They had a combination of very tight censorship of dissenting voices, and complete laissez-faire for violent and racist rhetoric as long as it was right wing.
2. It was used to organize a violent and very public revolution against the United States of America, which resulted in five deaths.
You almost certainly knew all these things already. The likely reason you are supporting Parler in this comment is because you agree with their political stance.
I don't care about Parler or crazy righ-wingers. I just care about the inconsistency with which these big platforms seems to be acting and so far I haven't seen anything provide a proper explanation for why Parler and not some of the other social networks out there.
You don't care about fairness, you are just trying to convince people that there was inconsistency - by ignoring massive differences between how the two platforms operated. Parler was acting differently then Twitter.
Well, first off, it's not necessarily the case that AWS's contract with Twitter is the same as AWS's contract with Parler.
But more importantly, whether or not a company chooses to enforce violations of contracts with third parties has no bearing on whether it can enforce violation of contract against you. The best you can argue is I think equitable estoppel: by not enforcing it on others, maybe they gave you a reasonable impression that your conduct wasn't violating. But AWS has a clause that says effectively "we don't waive any rights by not enforcing terms against you", and furthermore, AWS and Parler were already in communication about Parler's issues complying with the terms, which destroys any equitable estoppel claim.
What happened to Parler is not routine when you exclude all of the cases of blatant abuse of the service.
There are religious web hosts that will terminate you for not following their Statement of Faith, so I don't think Amazon would have any issues in requiring its customers to have a particular stance on gay marriage in the very unlikely event it wanted to.
Your analogy is shitty because there was no violent revolution conducted by Parler against Amazon.
The correct Analogy is the airline pilot kicking off any Parler employees traveling for business. That’s it.
It doesn't much matter; this case is dead in the water.
If you want to argue that travel isn’t essential to a business’s employees, that’s fine. My original question still stands though. How often does Amazon kick off tenants when they haven’t broken laws or abused technology (e.g. spammers)?
Technologists on message boards who are shocked and offended at Amazon's decision are generally tipping their hands that they don't ever have contracts reviewed, or really even think about them in their day-to-day work. A plain reading of Amazon's terms --- not to mention having paid attention to how cloud providers handled Gab --- made it clear that Parler's position was untenable.
Parler was widely distributing violent content from major leaders (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution) in a movement that reality showed was a real and not theoretical threat (c.f. the mob chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" in the rotunda).
I really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship. Parler had been around for years, uncensored. Almost all it's major accounts had history on Twitter for years before that (often having been kicked off for similarly violent content, btw).
If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it?
It's motivated reasoning. It's how you can get to the conclusion that Amazon cutting ties with Parler is unacceptable.
I don't necessarily think all people who follow this line came up with it spontaneously. I'm sure there's a lot of propaganda to this effect swirling in conservative media, pushed and promoted by bad faith actors for various short term partisan ends. I'm pretty sure that's why the specious comparisons between BLM and the capitol attack became so widespread.
Now that's motivated reasoning. You are choosing to dehumanize those who disagree with you, because that's more comfortable than acknowledging that they might have a legitimate grievance somewhere beneath all the ruckus around the election results.
It's logical to conclude that there will be blowback from a coordinated campaign to shut down the largest platform favored by "the other side".
What now? I pretty explicitly humanized them, and even shifted the blame a way from them. Personally, I think a lot of them are being shamelessly used and exploited.
> It's logical to conclude that there will be blowback from a coordinated campaign to shut down the largest platform favored by "the other side".
Not really. The largest platform favored by "the other side" (which I'm assuming is conservatives/Republicans) was and is Facebook.
Parler was only favored by a much smaller, radicalized subset of conservatives, mainly those who wanted to spread false claims of election fraud (because, IIRC, it only got popular in response to Twitter putting warning labels on such claims, which offended this radicalize subset). I'm totally fine with any blowback from such people, since their cause of championing lies needs to be utterly defeated, for the good of the country.
This patronizing belief that "those" people need to be protected from manipulation is used as more fuel on the fire. Thus the cycle of radicalization is amplified. Any victory gained by force will create the will within the defeated to build an opposing force.
Instead we have to look for the underlying causes (e.g. opioid epidemic, loss of opportunities, counterproductive cultural aversion to education, etc.) that drive people to rally together under the first cause that promises to help them, and address those.
Parler seems to have been caught completely unaware that there was a risk of AWS cancelling their service, so presumably there wasn't any serious attempt by Amazon to seek corrective measures. It seems unlikely there was even an attempt to understand Parler's moderation process, because having those conversations and raising/addressing concerns takes time.
It is clear that the process to remove Parler wasn't slow and deliberative. The question in my mind is whether it was explicitly political, implicitly political or if someone powerful in AWS was just panicking. None of the 3 situations bode well for anyone trying to use AWS as infrastructure for communication. Which is a number of their major customers.
1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
That is an interesting exhibit, thanks. It has swayed me on the time-frame, I'm not sure it changes my basic view - the AWS rep is talking about literally 3 posts in mid November, one of which seems to have 450 views in 5 days if the eye icon means what I think. From politely raising 3 horrible posts to extinguishing a business in a month and a half still leaves me questioning if the TOS was enforced politically.
While you are working though this the customer is used as a platform to organize an attack on the government of the the country you are based in. 5 people died as a result and there is every indication that if the attack had gone the way the attackers wanted it to that more would be dead including the Vice President of the United States.
Suddenly the cost calculation changes. It has become evident over the several months of negotiation that the customer has 0 intention of coming into compliance. The speech they are hosting has already resulted in a very large and very visible terrorist act. They have ceased to be profit center and become a liability. What do you do?
But, as chalst argues, there are interpretations where they were acting reasonably.
BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid.
A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives.
> BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid.
No argument on that particular point, but it is a decent reason not to try and use a certain infrastructure provider for communication tools or artistic content. Most people are looking for a dumb pipe when they pick an infrastructure provider, not a back-seat moderator with a twitchy trigger finger.
"This site we host was just used to plan a violent revolution. It's more trouble than it's worth, let's dump them."
Is this what you mean by "bias"?
Bias in this case works both ways. It makes some ignore the evidence that was already present. Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. This was about getting rid of a high risk client who had made clear that they will not be changing their high risk behavior. There is no reason AWS needs to share in that risk after giving them the opportunity to change.
If I became convinced the expulsion had nothing to do with Jan 6 and was part of a standard process of review that AWS conducted for all their customers then that'd be sufficient.
There were, generously, a few hundred people involved in the Capitol storming. It isn't obvious how organised they were organised since they lacked guns and riots sometimes start spontaneously from protests. AWS didn't have time to work out who they were, what they were trying to achieve, how they were organising, what there motivations were or what was going to happen next. Using that as a trigger to ban Parler - when they could easily have been organising on Facebook or in person - would be strong evidence of political bias.
> Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt.
I don't mind if AWS is biased, but part of the fun of kibitzing is assessing whether decisions are good or bad. AWS making decisions on bias rather than rational thought process would be bad. People who use evidence and can think in a consistent manner have a big advantage.
Twitter made the mistake of trying to rationalise their bias, giving us a memorial of them trying to rationalise "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." as a call to violence. It is a legitimate concern that the same sort of evidence-free thinking could take root in AWS's leadership - they might easily be drawing their leadership from similar pools of people to Twitter since the big tech companies are acting in the same direction at the same time.
Whoosh. The entire point of the evidence that exists is that Jan 6'th dramatically changed the risk calculation. Without Jan 6'th I can imagine that Parler might still be online. But if you ignore Jan 6'th and it's impacts you ignore a large part of the calculation going on for a business. Jan 6'th took Parler from hypothetically risky to proven risky.
You keep attempting to dodge or downplay those events but they happened and they had a very dramatic impact on the political landscape.
Some humans who run a biz serving other humans stood up and announced "you and you camp Auschwitz shirt friends are odious, we don't want that stank on us".
Is it political ? Maybe. Or maybe they are simply decent humans calling out some pieces of shit.
Other times and places in history people haven't stood up to the evil. In some, they did.
Amazon is fighting the good fight here. Facebook has been an open collaborator. Amazon drew a line in the sand and said " we are on this side, hope you join us"
Amazon was late, but ended up on the right side of history. Evil needs to be told that the rest of us think they are wrong. They can't figure it out on their own.
The more interesting question is why Parler were willing to risk being shut down in this way. I see two possibilities: either they did not have a realistic understanding of their situation, or they preferred to have Amazon pull the plug rather than being responsible for unpopular moderation of their users.
Read Amazon's reply to the case. They warned Parler for Weeks that posts were a massive violation of their TOS and Parler did exactly jack shit.
Finally they were kicked off.
Because the same content exists on Facebook and Twitter (for the same reason: moderation is hard) but nobody is trying to disconnect them.
> If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it?
They didn't. Twitter locked out the New York Post for reporting on the Hunter Biden story before the election.
What this appears to be about now is that the backlash from that sort of behavior was enough to cause a right-leaning social media site to become popular, and it continuing to grow in popularity would prevent them from doing similar things going forward.
Parler hoped to do moderation on a volunteer basis.
The two services simply aren't comparable.
You can run a service like Parler on all-volunteer (or, like Gab, no-volunteer) moderation. You just can't do it on Amazon's infrastructure. Plenty of companies that aren't organizing mass shootings or insurrections manage just fine without AWS, for a variety of reasons --- some of which even include cost savings.
The constant comparisons between Facebook and Parler are talking points, and insulting to our intelligence. We know better than to buy into this stuff.
Which appears to be less effective -- paid moderators aren't members of individual communities -- with the result that most of the planning of the riot happened on Facebook.
> Parler hoped to do moderation on a volunteer basis.
So does Reddit, doesn't it? Moderator of a sub is the creator, a user? And it seems to be less bad than Twitter and Facebook.
The reason people compare to Facebook and Twitter instead of Reddit is because they're worse.
> You can run a service like Parler on all-volunteer (or, like Gab, no-volunteer) moderation. You just can't do it on Amazon's infrastructure.
What happens if you can't do it on anybody's infrastructure who has the capacity to host a site that size?
But you're changing the subject.
Reddit would have killed the toxic sub and been done with it. Parler couldn't, because they were the toxic sub.
They were adding six digit numbers of users a day. Was a temporary backlog that unreasonable?
> Reddit bans whole subs when they get too out of hand to moderate, while Parler effectively is one of those banned subs.
Reddit (per Wikipedia) has 330 million users and 138,000 subs. Parler had 10 million users, equivalent to more than 4000 subs, not one.
And I think that's the root of it. "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.
But Parler _didn't even try_ any of these less drastic measures. They could have properly moderated, or if that's not possible because they were growing so fast they could have limited posts from new users, or added moderation bots, or could have blanket-banned the most problematic subgroups. They didn't do these things.
They did have restrictions on new users. People accused them of suppressing leftists by doing this.
> But Parler _didn't even try_ any of these less drastic measures.
Prior to the riot their failure was no greater than that of Facebook. Parler (but not Facebook) was forced offline almost immediately after it before being given any meaningful opportunity to do anything different in response.
It's also not obvious that their existing measures wouldn't have been as effective as alternatives once their user base stabilized and the backlog was cleared.
IIRC, Parler billed itself as an unmoderated "free speech" space [1]. IIRC, what little moderation it had was done by unpaid volunteer moderators, which in this case is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/parler-apple-g...: "Over the past several months, Parler has become one of the fastest-growing apps in the United States. Millions of President Trump’s supporters have flocked to it as Facebook and Twitter increasingly cracked down on posts that spread misinformation and incited violence, including muzzling Mr. Trump by removing his accounts this past week. By Saturday morning, Apple listed Parler as the No. 1 free app for its iPhones."
That's about 1/3 the size of /r/askreddit, and comparable to /r/politics. Your approach to the math here is silly for a variety of reasons (users can be members of multiple subs, membership isn't split evenly among all subreddits, there's a long tail of subs with 1 or 2 members, etc.) Parler was equivalent to a mid to large subreddit. It would have been around the 50th largest.
/r/politics, for comparison, has a moderation team of ~60, most of whom have years of experience moderating the subreddit, and is assisted by a number of bots (automoderator, as well as some /r/politics specific bots) developed and tuned over the years to help. They also have direct lines to the admins (most major subreddits do) for when they need more official assistance. The sub also has a fairly well understood set of rules, and users who are willing to report offending content.
Parler had none of those things. I've had the pleasure of moderating a (much, much!) smaller community. I once encountered a situation where it got viral for a very controversial reason. I and the rest of my moderation team was unable to keep up with the quantity of content being posted, so we did something very simple: we locked the subreddit temporarily, preventing anyone without a history in the community from participating.
I stand by that decision having been the responsible thing to do. I can understand why, for profit reasons, Parler didn't want to do the same thing, but it would have been the responsible thing to do.
> "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.
I've yet to see any evidence that this was the case. "Saving it" in the way Amazon wanted seems to be entirely anthitetical to the approaches Parler was willing to take. Even now, the best approach Parler has been able to come up with is to use some AWS ML scanner to detect bad content.
Funny you should bring those news stories up, because they are often focused on how understaffed these efforts are. On a moderator to 100k user ratio, Facebook and Parler had effectively the same (0).
Just because Facebook pays a few hundred people to suffer ongoing psychological trauma doesn’t mean they are doing anything more than paying lip service to the complaints.
Well the fact that the riots were organized on Facebook for the month leading up to it certainly looks inconsistent.
> If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it?
You mean until right after the elections that took away all of the Republican power to regulate tech? Seems like a great time to do it.
That's misleading. While there was definitely unacceptable activity that slipped through Facebook's moderation, they were making attempts to stop it.
IIRC, a lot of the organization activity on Facebook acted as a funnel to places like Parler. E.g. a protest event on Facebook, calculated to comply with its policies, which linked to Parler or Gab where more illicit planning could take place.
You don’t have to be perfect at content moderation. You do, however, need to be very responsive to the hosting provider. If they contact you about a piece of content in violation of the AUP, you better take it down ASAP.
Ultimately I think that is the core distinction between Parler and Twitter. Twitter has a professional moderation program that is responsive; Parler was not responsive, according to Amazon (and I’m sure they have the receipts).
Parler made this specific allegation under the Sherman Act. It was rejected because "Parler...proffered only faint and factually inaccurate speculation in support of a Sherman Act violation. AWS, in contrast...submitted sworn testimony disputing Parler’s allegations." That said, Parler "has not yet had an opportunity to conduct discovery," so maybe there's a bombshell text somewhere.
Well, tried to. They didn't do a good job of it at all. What they actually alleged (relevant towards this theory) was:
* There was set to a mass exodus of Twitter users to Parler
* AWS also hosts Twitter
... They didn't even allege that AWS conspire with Twitter. Sure, they don't have any evidence of that conspiracy without discovery, but they didn't even allege a fact that could be proven with discovery.
These two facts are supposed to sustain the theory that AWS had no other reason to kick off Parler other than a conspiracy to keep Twitter the dominant platform. Despite the complaint itself opening up by alleging that AWS kicked off Parler because Parler espouses conservative views and later conceding that Parler knew that its content violated AWS's terms, albeit Parler was attempting to rectify it.
There's another issue with Parler's claims that I haven't seen anyone else bring up: if Parler was expecting the influx of Twitter users as a result of Twitter banning Trump, how would kicking off Parler keep these users on Twitter or otherwise buttress Twitter's dominance?
No, the second of those is not a fact. Twitter does use AWS for some things, but the actual service is not hosted on AWS.
And that's pretty much the end of it. As the judge rightly points out in today's filing, all of Parler's talk about Twitter is just a bunch of hot air.
That could change if this lawsuit proceeds, and discovery reveals evidence of conspiracy. But that is all highly speculative at this point, and I would not be surprised if a company as lawyered up as Amazon has taken steps to make it all but impossible for such a thing to occur.
This case may not succeed but I can see it being re-used as part of a larger antitrust lawsuit. Though I doubt a democrat DOJ will actively drive such a lawsuit against big tech.
Twitter content isn't on AWS now though, and there's no way to know what Twitter has agreed to remove in the move over to AWS, so essentially this argument says that Parler should be allowed to stay on AWS because it's possible that AWS might host similar content in the future. That argument obviously doesn't work. A business can't be judged on what might happen in the future.
[citation required] This is an absurd claim.
After that there is a major divergence between the type of content they host, moderation processes, and documented outcomes of moderation (eg: people espousing left-wing views being banned from Parler) that show the real difference between the two products and why one was booted and the other wasn’t.
Judging by how weak their infrastructure was in the first place, getting any kind of resilient hosting in place after all the industry behemoths turned their backs on Parler was clear not a viable option. If you can't get your site to work well with all the best tools, you really have little hope in the wild west.
If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on optimizing the stack to improve efficiency. It's also way more realistic to scale up your infrastructure in the short run until you know you've stabilized at a point where you can purchase and operate dedicated hardware to offset the steep margins cloud providers charge.
On top of it all, their product itself seems off-putting to a large portion of tech workers, which would make hiring talented individuals even harder.
It seems they did not set a sufficient foundation for such a possibility, and got caught unprepared.
My understanding of the scraped data is that some APIs used both sequential keys, and ignored both permissions and their soft delete flag. It’s not clear to me whether or not that API was permanently unauthenticated, or if it failed open once Okta locked them out.
They will pay far more for bandwidth than they ever will for hardware.
Unless you are building your webservice like it's 1998 (And webservices in 1998 sucked), you can't really disentangle from hosted solutions.
Count 1 (antitrust) fails because you need to actually allege a conspiracy, not just say "Twitter is also a customer of AWS!" I mean, I immediately realized it was deficient on their initial brief, because they didn't even back up enough evidence to satisfy their own citations, let alone explain how they can pass the big citation they conveniently omit (Twombly).
Counts 2 and 3 fail because the gravamen is that AWS violated its own contract by not giving 30 days' notice. Ignoring the very next paragraph that says AWS can terminate with no notice. Their own response to that point in the reply brief was pitiful.
Actually, their response was so pitiful they tried a second reply brief (that's the "supplemental authority" brief) where they instead changed their argument to "this is our reading of the contract, and you have to endorse it because it's a contract of adhesion." Which instead comes across as "we totally missed that part in the contract, and now we're trying to legal fu our way out of not reading a contract." Changing your argument on the fly doesn't tend to go very well in the courts.
The quality of their legal briefs is not impressive, and when you're going up a large corporation with deep pockets and competent legal attorneys to defend themselves, you're going to have a very rough time of it.
This is the part I don't understand. Did they really think no one would notice it?
Their previous attorney apparently dropped them as a client sometime around the 8th, and I suspect this lawsuit was put together in extreme rush on the 10th to keep Parler running. It absolutely wouldn't surprise me if neither Parler nor the attorney actually reviewed the agreement in enough detail to notice that AWS had the right to terminate immediately. Admittedly, this theory doesn't explain how the antitrust count gets added.
Argument from authority is one of the weakest forms of argument. If you want to weaken it, you turn it into argument from claimed authority that no evidence was offered for. If you want to weaken it even further, you set that weak argument against a judge's decision and the reasoned analysis of other people who clearly have read the legal briefs and have pointed out specific problems with the arguments made.
This is exactly what you did. Now maybe you are exactly what you say and you are exactly right. However based on your current content, you are indistinguishable from a troll. And that is exactly how people are responding to you.
If you don't want people to treat you as a troll, you need to provide enough actual meat that it is clear that you are not a troll. But until you are willing to do that, you should expect the response that you are getting.
If your expectations are different, then that is your mistake. You should learn how the internet works and adjust your expectations accordingly.
If you want an example to look at, see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rayiner. He is a respected lawyer who often posts opinions that run counter to the average opinion on this site. But when he speaks about the law, people listen. Not because he claims to be a lawyer, but because he speaks in a way that demonstrates his knowledge of the subject.
If tptacek, security researcher, says a case is no real case (even with arguments) and an attorney contradicts him then that is evidence tptacek is wrong.
Realistically, I still expect Ptacek to be right - I don't see how Amazon could be forced to host something they don't want to. Nor why it would make sense to make them to. So I hope this lawsuit fails. But the way Parler was assassinated seems a bit questionable and there might be some cause for complaint there. It may be that AWS's terms of service are overruled by some law somewhere and they'll owe someone money.
Or, put more simply, to me, reasoning from a non-expert trumps non-reasoning from an expert.
> If tptacek, security researcher, says a case is no real case (even with arguments) and an attorney contradicts him then that is evidence tptacek is wrong.
There is no evidence lest it's explained why the former is wrong. I know for a fact that a judge with actual credentials didn't think the case had merit. Now LiquidmetalFish claims otherwise, without any supporting arguments or reasoning.
If you wanted to write a "long form" (?) reply then you could have done so. In the meantime the hand wave above has to stand on its own merits; or more specifically fall on its lack thereof.
I also think this entire thread will be worth revisiting upon appeal.
This only further highlights how unnecessary the original low value reply was. Instead of responding with something of substance that took five additional minutes to write, you told us your qualifications instead of your views.
> I also think this entire thread will be worth revisiting upon appeal.
I don't really see why. None of the reasons you got downvoted have anything to do with this specific case (low effort comments, arguments to authority, complaining about the response to the forementioned, and then arguments that are poorly explored/rely on erroneous facts).
Even if Parler ultimately won via an entirely new theory of US law as you have argued, it wouldn't change that your comments here today could have been better and would have been received better if they were.
Your subsequent comment avoided all of that by having something tangible which can be evaluated.
I find it interesting that you think you can read minds as what expectations downvoters have about their downvotes’ effect on your behavior.
As you say, “That’s not how anything works…”
Is that how you talk to the judge in court?
If you actually offered an analysis that demonstrated your expertise you would have probably gotten upvotes instead of downvotes.
Packinghan v North Carolina (2017) - Access to social media and digital infrastructure cannot be prohibited by the state.
Marsh v Alabama (1946) - Constitutional protections of 1st and 14th amendments applicable within confines of “town” owned by a private entity.
Packinghan, viewed in combination with Marsh, provides an interesting lens for issues concerning a digit company owned town. If data storage and/or social media can be viewed as critical digital infrastructure and a private organization provides those services, an argument can and will likely be made that the services are tantamount to a digital company owned town.
As Justice Ginsburg said during oral argument regarding private digital networks, “the point is that these people are being cut off from a very large part of the marketplace of ideas. And the First Amendment includes not only the right to speak, but the right to receive information.”
And as Justice Kagan stated during Packinghan oral argument, "whether it’s political community, whether it’s religious community... these sites have become embedded in our culture as ways to communicate and ways to exercise our constitutional rights.”
Moreover, AWS's behavior may be viewed as an antitrust issue, acting in conjunction with a cartel. A party does not need to have majority market share to function in coordination with other dominate players in order to form a cartel that can manipulate the market.
Also, they may or may not have provided sufficient notice (a contract issue).
Either way, it's definitely relevant to industry and likely to be litigated on appeal following the trial court's ruling (whatever it is).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama#Subsequent_hi...
Manhattan Community Access Corp. finds that _public access television stations_ aren't subject to the First Amendment, let alone private web hosts.
I mean, as an attorney, I think it would be kind of interesting to see what happened if the Supreme Court ruled that private web hosts in general, or Amazon in particular, are somehow state actors. It would be one of the most practically disruptive-to-society court decisions I can think of, about as interesting to watch as declaring that all warehouses are now public parks. But it's against both recent precedent and common sense.
They operate under the extremely valuable liability protection granted them in section 230 of the CDA.
If I were to take government funds to build my warehouse, there's a pretty decent case that it is at least a public forum, if not a park.
>“In sum, the financial participation of the City in the Mall’s progress, the arrangements with the City police substation, and the active presence of other governmental agencies in the common areas of the Mall, constitute governmental involvement in the operation of the Mall,” the court noted. Thus, it concluded the mall’s “open and public areas ... effectively function as a public place,” and that mall owners couldn’t restrict distribution of political pamphlets or signature gathering in the mall’s common areas without violating the state Constitution.
Also, General Dynamics absolutely operates under many contractual obligations in which the federal government directly dictates how they shall run their business.
The Marsh line of decisions you're referring to was disposed of upthread. It's dead, Jim. SCOTUS just last year said you can't expect to pretend social networks operate as public squares; you can only claim functions that are normally exclusively the province of governments.
The basis for title 9 regulation is that universities take Federal grants.
Amazon isn't the state.
> Marsh v Alabama (1946) - Constitutional protections of 1st and 14th amendments applicable within confines of “town” owned by a private entity.
Which doesn't apply here, as Amazon isn't a company town/acting in a quasi-governmental capacity.
> AWS's behavior may be viewed as an antitrust issue, acting in conjunction with a cartel.
The court ruled on this, and pointed out that the accusations were factually erroneous.
> Moreover, they may or may not have provided sufficient notice (a contract issue).
The court ruled on this, and sided with Amazon (zero notice in this circumstance). If anything Amazon giving them 24 hours was above what the contract required.
I suggest reading the court's opinion before replying, since it undercuts many/most of the points you've tried to make.
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> Packinghan v North Carolina (2017) - Access to social media and digital infrastructure cannot be prohibited by the state.
Amazon isn't the state.
- Correct. My point is that Packinghan, viewed in combination with Marsh, provides an interesting lens for issues concerning potentially monopolistic behavior. IF data storage and/or social media can be viewed as critical digital infrastructure, an argument can and will likely be made that the services are tantamount to a digital company owned town. We'll see! Either way it's very interesting and highly relevant to the industry.
Seems like the core of your argument is that private companies could be subject to constitutional protections if they got too big enough/powerful.
Even ignoring that you've essentially invented a new interpretation of US law/ignored all existing precedent, the fact that AWS (32% market share) isn't a monopoly by either common definition or as defined by federal law completely undercuts even such a novel legal theory.
So you're on the outskirts of both law and basic facts here.
i) Antitrust - AWS's behavior may be viewed as an antitrust issue, acting in conjunction with a cartel. A party does not need to have majority market share to function in coordination with other dominate players in order to form a cartel that can manipulate the market. There's case law concerning market manipulation, access to industry and consumer protection issues where parties didn't need to directly coordinate to be considered a cartel.
ii) Practical dependence on service providers for access to critical digital infrastructure. To what extent do we depend on particular services for participation in society and the marketplace will influence the analysis. At what point does a data service provider begin to resemble a common carrier (i.e. cable, phone or internet provider) and in what context would common carrier laws apply?
iii) Contract issues - A few of the foreseeable issues include sufficient notice, contract breach, degree of harm (irreparable harm?), performance obligations.
In reality they will be able to do neither thing, because we are all aware that Twitter is not in fact worried about Parler, and that Amazon could give 3/5ths of a flying fuck whether Twitter is worried about Parler regardless. It's a fantasy which has taken on a cloak of plausibility because we have other antitrust concerns about Amazon. But that cloak will not do Parler any good in this trial, nor will our other entirely reasonable concerns about tech consolidation.
Similarly, the judge didn't so much poke holes in Parler's contract claims so much as singlehandedly demolish them, pointing out that Parler's claim about their rights under Amazon's contract were directly contradicted by the very next paragraph after the last one they cited in their complaint.
It would be helpful if you could acknowledge the ruling we're commenting on rather than continuing to argue as if this was entirely abstract. We have some (imperfect) authority to rely on now, in the form of today's ruling.
Additional briefs following the TRO, replies, nor responses have been filed.
There has been no discovery, no fact finding, no expert witnesses, no oral argument, no jury trial and no opinion. The case has not been adjudicated by the District Court. It has not reached a stage where it can be appealed to the Circuit Court and it certainly has not reached post appellate petition for cert to the Supreme Court.
It's a short document! It's well written! I recommend it.
Further: some of what you said upthread is contradicted by facts now acknowledged by the court. There may be some barely-colorable argument about antitrust or contracts of adhesion or something, but there is not in fact a colorable argument that Amazon was required to give notice to Parler before terminating them for violation of their AUP; that's in the plain language of the contract, which is on the record in the case, but is also the easily-downloaded AUP a Google search will provide you. Your arguments would be more credible if they acknowledged those facts, rather than implying that they were somehow still up in the air.
Well, neither was Standard Oil by that definition.
Of course, we already know how to solve the problem of companies having too much leverage due to owning too big verticals - namely to break them up. Not to institute everything-goes rules.
Courts have never as far as I can find used antitrust on an actor controlling a market at the low level Amazon has here. Can you find such a case?
Correct, but as part of the TRO process, the court is asked to view the merits of the case given what it knows, as part of the determination of granting a preliminary injunction is whether the plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits.
The courts opinion, quite plainly, is that Parler is unlikely to succeed on the merits:
> In short, Parler has proffered only faint and factually inaccurate speculation in support of a Sherman Act violation.
> Parler has not denied that at the time AWS invoked its termination or suspension rights under Sections 4, 6 and 7, Parler was in violation of the Agreement and the AUP.
> Parler has failed to allege basic facts that would support several elements of this claim. Most fatally, as discussed above, it has failed to raise more than the scantest speculation that AWS’s actions were taken for an improper purpose or by improper means.
> IF data storage and/or social media can be viewed as critical digital infrastructure, an argument can and will likely be made that the services are tantamount to a digital company owned town.
This argument will fail, for reasons I outlined in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25781560. To briefly reiterate: Marsh v. Alabama concerned a privately owned town using state force (e.g. police) to enforce trespassing law.
But nothing about those rulings prevents the town from putting up a fence and a gate, and banning people from re-entering.
Twitter (and AWS) have a fence and a gate, and a guard who checks your ID anytime you try to enter the area.
How on earth is Amazon kicking them off "monopolistic behavior"? There are literally thousands of hosting providers in just about every country on this planet. Parler was quick to point out none of their infrastructure is in any way tied to Amazon.
The contrary is the case here. If anything, AWS is helping its competition by giving them Parler's users.
While the former has some lofty language about central social media has become in society, it's still a decision about state action.
Marsh seems like a reach as well - PragerU tried that and it didn't work. I'm not convinced Parler would fare any better here.
Judge Rothstein stated it quite plainly in today's order: "It is important to note what this case is not about. Parler is not asserting a violation of any First Amendment rights." (Page 2, lines 4-5)
But digital communities do not trap individuals, there is no practical limit except of mental effort to the number of accounts or social media networks a person can simultaneously use. Instead, the costs are borne by the networks themselves, which scales with the number of users.
This is an inversion of the scenario as the public is a passive participant, nothing is forced upon them. This is why I think the argument is not a good fit.
Parler and AWS, as business entities, can only act in their own interests as there is no duty between a corporation and the general public, only their customers through either a uniform or contractual relationship. Wouldn't you agree? It would be dangerous to assume that a corporation has a specific duty to the general public beyond existing customers. That is, AWS only has to deal with Parler, not Parler's customers. That is on Parler.
And I don't think the state enters into this at all.
Parler is a Russian company so it should be easy to sign up with local providers.
The only surprising things here are a) it took the judge a week to deny this motion, and b) AWS hasn't asked for the case to be transferred to arbitration (given the mandatory arbitration clause in the TOS somewhere).
This was the most surprising angle to me - that the case didn't fail prima facie on this clause alone. I guess at least it serves to really emphasize how bad of a case they brought.
Well, actually, they said that it could pass on irreperable harm, but that was somewhat mitigated by the fact that much (but not all) of the harm could be addressed by money damages.
It did fail the the other 3 elements, and the balancing test in the alternate Ninth Circuit criteria.
I wouldn't call that a laughable claim...
Also, can you draw a direct causal line between AWS hosted Parler posts and actual violence that took place on Jan 6th?
Amazon argues that Parler had a role in the insurrection, so banning them is in the public good. Given the amount of content from the insurrection on Parler, it seems more likely than not that at least one person there was influenced by Parler. There is no requirement that absolute proof be shown, the judge is weighing probabilities here. It also helps Amazon that injunctive reliefs are considered an extraordinary measure, so Amazon wins by default unless Parler can reach a significant bar.
This was a moonshot, and Parler knew it. They're asking for a strong legal response based on a pretty flimsy case. Even if what they are saying is true (which I strongly doubt, but what if), they simply don't have the evidence they need to get this relief.
I think that the real, concrete harm done to Parler's by their instant removal from Amazon is definitely not balanced by whatever "harm" in some Parler client's head before 6 Jan. I don't think it's a close call, and it is scary that federal judges are willing to make such a judgement.
The standard here seems to be that any unsubstantiated theoretical harm from user-uploaded content can be used as a basis to instantly kill any AWS client's business, if Amazon suddenly feels like doing so.
† We'll all know soon enough, since Parler got dumped by a trivial IDOR vulnerability almost the moment AWS gave them notice they were going to be taken offline.
Parler failed the first test.
Clearly Parler will suffer irreparable harm here, but they failed by a good margin to meet any of the other tests here.
This is the winner right here. It's a rather brilliant play, it keeps reminding their users that they exist. If they can find new hosting before they run out of ways to get in the headlines, they stand a good chance of keeping many of their users.
I would expect to see another wild filing after discovery. They'll find a quote from low-level employees from Amazon and Twitter talking to each other, inflate their credentials so they seem like they have authority, and then make a Sherman Act claim out of it.
I'm curious what lawyer would be willing to file these. The judge even takes the time to point out the places where Parler undermines their own case. This seems like it's just sacrificing your legal career; who would hire you after showing up in court and arguing this with a straight face?
I absolutely agree with you. This is as true now as it has ever been, since the earliest days of purely commercial httpd hosting operations in like, 1994 or thereabouts.
Long before the existence of individual virtual machines that anyone with a credit card could rent, hosting companies and colocation/datacenter type places have regularly declined to do business with customers they perceive as toxic, and have ended hosting relationships with customers they no longer wanted.
They haven't released the actual contract itself but from what Parler said in their lawsuit, they had a clause in their contract that if AWS wanted to terminate their contract with cause, AWS would have to give Parler 30 days notice to cure the contract breach or get booted. AWS did not do this instead giving them 24 hours.
Edit:
Reading AWS terms does appear to give them the right to terminate. not ashamed to be proven wrong.
As mentioned above, they don’t have to give you 30 days before suspending for violating the AUP.
Now it's possible that the contract has some other wording, or that Amazon will argue that they didn't need to be as formal as Parler thinks. But as this goes through the courts, we will find out more.
They provide context for a lay audience, and while their language isn't simple, it is understandable to a non-native speaker like me.
Is this usual? or is it that for such cases with high publicity, the courts select judges that are know as good writers?
> the courts select judges that are know as good writers?
These aren't generally written solely by the judge. The judge's clerk will often draft some or all of it, which the judge can then edit or sign off on. The judge may also consult it with other people or judge's if they want or need to.
There’s an extensive body of specialized knowledge and terminology in the law, and a lot of that comes through making short-hand out of bits of decisions or enactments for the convenience of having brevity in reference, but with decisions clarity, both of results and reasoning, is a pretty big goal.
Robert Barnes, on the Parler lawsuit https://youtu.be/pAFZw7fGY4A
Viva Frey, a lawyer did a breakdown on the lawsuit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFp5E7akgy8
Robert Barnes, On section 230, and the tech lawsuits https://youtu.be/rD-Zb0nTJw0
Their take on it is that the tech companies have gone too far, and are too arrogant. And now the political climate has shifted. So they will start losing some of these section 230 related cases.
Uncivil Law is a friend of theirs and he goes over the contract here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhWDKx9myI0&t=6187s
He's a conservative lawyer, so he doesn't have a political bias against Parler. They just don't have a case. I think Parler's lawyers misread the contract and thought the 30-day notice applied to termination for cause.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qhXD-4Kaw5dCEBv0dUM8buygEKg...
Parler hasn't lost the case, just a TRO that demands reinstatement on AWS, but the ruling on the TRO requires the judge to tip their hand about the case, and Parler is going to lose.
I don't think you even need to read the AWS AUP to know that Parler has no real case here. To buy Parler's contract claim, you'd have to believe that Amazon's lawyers are so stupid that they set out a TOS for the world's largest hosting provider that didn't give AWS the right to boot customers, which is something AWS --- really, every hosting provider --- has to do all the time. You almost have to not know anything about the hosting business to think there could be a case here.
But if you need to read a judge laughing Parler's claims off, well, now you can. Real "based" energy in excerpting the AWS AUP in their complaint and clipping it right before the clause that gives AWS the right to terminate service without notice to customers who violate their AUP. The judge, uh, noticed.
(As the judge points out, among the many problems with Parler's restraint of trade argument, there's the fact that AWS doesn't host Twitter's feed.)