If you’re not flaunting ToS, then making sure you have all your legal items taken care of (trademark, copyright, patents), you should be fine.

If you’re building something that a cloud provider might adopt or build their own, well, isn’t that risky regardless of the cloud provider element?

I know some companies avoid one provider or the other out of competitive concerns. That seems easily managed with contractual obligations.

Twitter has enabled some borderline illegal behavior, but the account holder has been the one at risk. I don’t think Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did.

> If you’re not flaunting ToS,... you should be fine.

https://aws.amazon.com/aup/: You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is.. offensive.

What does offensive mean? Who defines it?

> Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did.

Does this sound libelous to you, and do you have evidence supporting this? Even AWS's response didn't allege Parler "systematically allowed illegal behavior".

You forgot the "I don't think" part of that sentence.

In Parler's case their platform was proudly used to organise illegal activity. Which is against ToS, not ideological.

If someone hosted an MP3 piracy site or torrent tracker or carding forum on AWS, it would likely terminated too, regardless of whether Amazon are ideologically against piracy.

I'm no fan of the content on Parler, but Twitter (who uses AWS) was used for far more organization of illegal activity than Parler was. Twitter wasn't targeted though. I don't think it was ideologically agreement with Twitter (although I'm sure there is much ideological agreement as the tech industry has become quite the echo chamber) as much as Twitter is just far too rich and powerful to be shut down.

If you're a big fish with powerfu rich users like Twitter, then vendor lock-in isn't a risk. If you're a small, inconsequential platform that can be smashed like a fly on the window, then you really need to care about such things.

>I'm no fan of the content on Parler, but Twitter (who uses AWS) was used for far more organization of illegal activity than Parler was.

Parler outright refused to delete posts calling for the mass killing of politicians, even when those posts were specifically pointed out to Parler by AWS. This is all detailed in court documents. AWS very patiently tried to prod Parler into following AWS's terms of service, but Parler refused. This is a very clear-cut matter and those suggesting otherwise are either trying to deceive or being misled.

What specific posts did Parler refuse to delete, and what is the evidence that they refused to delete them? IIRC, Parler was deleting posts that AWS complained about as they reviewed them, but had a large backlog, and AWS decided they were moving too slowly. I haven't seen any sourced claims that Parler refused to remove "posts calling for the mass killing of politicians", only unsupported allegations. If it really is so very clear-cut, do you have a very good source for those claims?

To reiterate, AWS provided this evidence in its court filings when it was sued by Parler. Pages and pages of email records where AWS customer service reps sent Parler specific posts that violated AWS's ToS, and Parler's responded refusing to take them down.

This matches my understanding as well. The CEO (at the time) was on a podcast and specifically said they were moderating/deleting the posts. AWS just wanted it to be done faster (in an automated fashion).

> Twitter (who uses AWS)

Twitter also uses GCP, and Azure I’m sure. Their serving layer is not hosted by AWS though, and I’m reasonably certain AWS could not shut down Twitter immediately simply terminating their AWS account.

Parler was set up to harbour the exact sort of people that got banned from platforms like Twitter for being too unhinged and in some cases dangerous. It's not really comparable.