I wonder whose side the FSF would take.

Amazon shouldn't be making these decisions, and certainly not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements. This should have been litigated in court prior to taking deplatforming actions.

Imagine if Amazon was a Chinese company and Parler hosted information about the plight of the Uyghur people.

Community websites have the right to enforce rules. I'm not so sure common carriers do, and AWS is a common carrier. A good rule of thumb for American hosting companies is if the FBI won't seize the website for the content hosted therein, the website shouldn't be removed.

For context, I'm a liberal and dislike the content on Parler. Defending free speech is more important than zapping the republicans. Imagine if the tables were flipped and talking about abortion was what conservatives wanted to ban.

AWS is not a common carrier. They are a hosting company. There are hundreds (thousands?) of hosting companies to choose from and you are not even required to use one to host a website on the Internet. You are free to host your website yourself on your own hardware.

> Amazon shouldn't be making these decisions, and certainly not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements

Amazon is still working with Parler to export their data off of AWS.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

> We will ensure that all of your data is preserved for you to migrate to your own servers, and will work with you as best as we can to help your migration

Taking the services entirely offline then giving them a few weeks to access archived data does not entirely cover the definition of (at least in my opinion):

> not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements

Going entirely offline like that can easily destroy a web business. Or at a minimum seriously harm them.

Not to say I care much for Parler's technical nor administrative approach to providing free speech.

Parler ignored repeated notices of TOS violations from Amazon, were given a chance to address their frequent TOS violations and incomplete enforcement of TOS violation notices, and came back with a very weak plan while still ignoring specific TOS violations AWS had notified them of.

Parler had ample time. They ignored warnings, they did not address their TOS violations. Then their contract was terminated, and AWS is helping them migrate after the fact. Parler displayed an ignorance of the law and how web hosting works.

Web companies that repeatedly violate the TOS of their hosts deserve to be at the mercy of their failover plans. That responsibility is borne by the web company, not the host.

Why aren't you hosting them?

Because they're not Amazon.

I'd imagine that the FSF would say parler should be using free software for their hosting, so that they can switch to local hosting if they want

Their position is usually to not rely on non free software

Parler was, by the by. The issue is that their hardware requirements were bonkers, so finding a new host capable of giving them a few hundred servers and dedicated 10G internal network capacity wasn’t trivial.

AWS is not a common carrier

At their size, they sure seem like it.

What happens when AWS and Azure design their own silicon, outstrip other hosting providers, and then become the only hosts on the internet?

Are they common carriers then?

Common carriers are regulated entities like shipping companies and telecoms. You get to be one through a huge amount of bureaucracy, negotiation with regulators, etc. It protects you from a lot of liability but also creates a lot of constraints on what you can do, what you can charge, etc. Either way, you don't just wake up one morning and discover that your company has become one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

This is a valid thought experiment to consider.

I'm old enough that racking my own boxes and hosting everything myself is both natural and easy (and cheaper and faster).

But working with plenty of young developers, most don't have any exposure or interest in setting up anything other than AWS services tied together.

So like it or not (I don't) we're rushing towards a world where AWS (maaybe GCP, mostly not) is the only way to build something.

It's good to consider the implications of this.

That’s not true though.

By volume, GoDaddy is actually a bigger host than AWS by a factor of 2.

The HN crowd vastly overestimates how big AWS is compared to less sexy options.

The difference is that AWS hosts big clients and makes big bucks in return. Godaddy's hosting had 300m in revenue[0], while AWS did nearly 13 billion[1].

0: https://www.zdnet.com/article/godaddy-q3-revenue-beats-expec....

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/aws-earnings-q4-2020.html#Bo....

It's definitely true that AWS customers spend more than Godaddy customers, for sure. But I still reject the idea that you have to use AWS (or will in the near future). There are literally hundreds of hosting providers out there, thousands if you include places that will run your own hardware. In my own career only half of my jobs have depended on AWS in any capacity; the rest used other hosting providers or self hosted.

In a very real way, a founder today has more options for hosting than they do for catered lunch.

Size doesn't have anything to do with it. No matter how big AWS and Azure get or what hardware they use, you can host a website out of a computer in your closet or the phone in your hand. No one needs them to operate, it's just convenient & cost-effective to do so.

Nah, anyone can set up a host.

What does "outstrip" even mean? Physically ripping the silicon out from the servers in your garage?

It means overtake or outcompete. In this case they’re saying that the big cloud hosting providers could end up in a monopoly like position that smaller companies couldn’t compete with if they developed their own superior server tech.

Don't AWS, GCP, and Azure have the majority of the market already? What would them having their own silicon change?

Oh sorry, I’m not defending the point just explaining what outstrip meant in context of it.