EFF: Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary

What is this "whining" if not an act in our own self-interest? :)

> I would sum this point up by saying that mainstream companies do not want to find themselves aligned with high-profile situations skirting the edge of the law.

That's what I thought until YouTube was bought by Google. With all the furor over music and movies and Napster and all the rest, I wouldn't have expected YouTube to last 5 minutes considering the massive amount of copyrighted content that they hosted.

Clearly companies have no problem skirting the law, and in fact any number of large companies do that regularly with impunity (e.g. Monsanto and the over 50 Superfund sites it is responsible for contaminating; AT&T and its assistance with warrantless wiretapping; BP and the spill aftermath).

Large corporations skirt the law and/or flip off the government all the time, even in cases of well-settled legislation.

Here we have a situation which is FAR from settled -- the 1917 Espionage Act and its amendments with the 1918 Sedition Act which were upheld at the time would never have passed muster in the face of later recognitions of First Amendment protections. The Pentagon Papers case supposedly "left the question open", but with 9 separate opinions filed, the government (having failed with prior restraint) apparently didn't feel at all confident about pursuing criminal, after-the-fact penalties, despite having decades to do so.

It's quite clear that this has nothing to do with law; it has to do with unofficial pressure -- extrajudicial pressure coming from many quarters. It's as if to say, "Poisoning the hoi polloi is one thing, but you messed with OUR stuff, and now it's personal."

I feel for Amazon and even the evil PayPal in this case, because how are you supposed to run a business when the government can send in its bogeymen to make you comply without even bothering with the courts? It makes for an extra set of unofficial laws to bully you with -- bully, because clearly it doesn't actually achieve the purported aim (the horse has left the barn) but is simply a show of force to make everyone kowtow.

Kind of like Mean Girls. The Queen Bee was shown up, and she can't undo it but she can take it out on her clique and make them not talk about it.

“Hosting wikileaks gains little and could be quite costly in lawsuits, ddos, loss of political standing and bad press”

The whole point of singling out Amazon as a coward is to rebalance the cost and gain. Some people are expecting business to have morales too (well yes some don't and the topic is quite debatable).

Otherwise it will gradually end up with situations in some country (should be obvious I assume) where any government official with sufficient power can make a phone call to an Internet company to delete unwanted content, and the guy receiving the call would be beaten to death if he dares to say no.

There's also a question of profit. Monsanto, for example, probably saved millions, if not billions, by skirting the edges of EPA regulations. To use another example, if the Macondo well had come online, BP would have saved hundreds of millions by skimping on safety measures. However, there's not enough profit to justify the risk for Amazon, and they're cutting WikiLeaks off for that reason alone.

In business its not about the law - that's what high priced law firms are for. Its about profit, and no business will fight the good fight if there's no money at the end. Just look at Google and Net Neutrality. As long as network providers were refusing to negotiate, Google was raising holy hell about network neutrality and traffic shaping. However, the moment some started to negotiate, Google dropped its hard line and crafted a joint statement riddled with exceptions and caveats.

Corporations are powerful but fickle allies. Take heart when they're fighting on your side, but don't count on them to do so to the end. They'll drop you and your cause the moment it becomes clear that there are other ways to secure their profit.

An interesting problem. Despite my objections to their actions (which I spelled out in a different thread) I'm not really upset with Amazon. I will probably not buy from them for a while, but I know that won't really affect their bottom line and I partly just enjoy brick-and-mortar stores most of the time anyway. I can't even necessarily say that I would act any different in their shoes - business is business and a lot of the time that means every person for themselves. In other words, I'm not entirely idealistic and naive. Still, it really sucks that potential government repercussions can affect private businesses enough to circumvent the safeguards which documents like the US Constitution are meant to provide.