Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down • Hacker News Board

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#261

Post by toofy » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

throwaway45349 wrote: post #5

As much as I don't like Parler's digital death sentence from Silicon Valley, they should've known this was coming and prepared. It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand an…

> Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand and pretend the risk of de-platforming never existed.

Im with everything your post says, but I’m not even fully convinced this is an issue.

Twitter can argue a good faith effort and point to millions of accounts and posts it has removed–from all political persuasions. It can also point to constant policy changes to address what Amazons policy sees as a very real problem.

parler on the other hand has had its ceo say quite clearly that they have zero intention as a company to even address this problem.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#262

Post by myownpetard » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #163

dhimes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than free speech, they have Free Market Rights. Ironically, those bitching about them removing Parler are usually the strongest supporters of the Free Market.

Exactly. Where were they when Christian Bakers didn't want to sell cakes for gay weddings?

Far right extremists are not a protected class. LGBTQ is a protected class. A business can choose to not to serve a far right extremist based on their far right extremism. A business cannot choose to not serve a gay person because they are gay. So tired of seeing this false equivalency being posted here and elsewhere.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#263

Post by tw04 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

mercurialshark wrote: post #213

Someone1234 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Packinghan v North Carolina (2017) - Access to social media and digital infrastructure cannot be prohibited by the state. 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 viewe…

There has been no ruling by the court on the merits of the case. A TRO is simply a request for injunctive relief, asking the court to compel AWS to reinstate services pending litigation. -- > 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…

>- 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.

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.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#264

Post by snoshy » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #253

duskwuff wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Parler actively avoided making technical decisions which would tie them to AWS. Their problems coming back online have primarily been because most major hosting providers have refused to take their business (and possibly also as a result of their ridiculous hardware requirements, cf. https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 ).

Those are... rather onerous HW requirements. Do you really need 20k cores to run a small-medium size social network? Asking because I have personal running a 40-50 million monthly users file sharing site on less than a tenth of that and most of it was done with Rails (itself not the most minimalist of frameworks).

Yeah, those requirements are quite steep for what Parler does. That being said, it is actually incredibly hard to scale any product that sees a sudden massive influx of users, media attention, and conflict like this. I mean this from a purely technical standpoint.

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.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#265

Post by walrus01 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #2

Here's the denial of the TRO: 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 believ…

> 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

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.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#266

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #169

nickysielicki wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL and I'm not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but I do think the case is more interesting than just AWS booting a malicious customer (with regards to their TOS). > 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'…

> 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. 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…

Moreover, as I'm fond of pointing out: Amazon bounces people off AWS all the time, just like every hosting provider; abuse is a basic fact of life in hosting. Amazon will have no trouble establishing that what it did with Parler is routine, and that nobody could reasonably have an expectation that the AUP was merely performative.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#267

Post by tobylane » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

richardARPANET wrote: post #53

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Parler wasn't dropped for making Amazon look bad. Parler was dropped for repeatedly failing to address blatant terms of service violations. AWS still hosts the National Enquirer, the magazine that literally tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos. AWS is hardly in the habit of r…

Dropped by Amazon, in coordination with both App Stores just as it reached #1 ranked app. Really really interesting.

Do you have a source for it reaching that rank?

Iirc it was dropped from the two app stores about 12h apart.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#268

Post by vlunkr » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #257

vlunkr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. If AWS had to get a court order every time someone tried to do something illegal, or against TOS on their platform, the courts would be flooded immediately.

> I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. Huh? Why shouldn't I be able to mine bitcoins on AWS? What's the point of paying to use people's computers if I can't use them for what I want? I pay AWS because I have money and they have servers and I want to pay them money in exchange for us…

Maybe you can on AWS, I don't know, but it's also not the point. The purpose of our service was primarily for web hosting, and it ran on VMs, so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers. It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS. Which is the same conclusion the judge came to in this Parler case.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#269

Post by travisoneill1 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #210

travisoneill1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an issue, but I dispute point 1 because the leaders of the tech industry would very much like to wash their hands of politics and be seen as neutral platforms so they can save money on moderation. Most of these same platforms pretty much had an anything goes unless it's illegal attitude from the time they were started until a few years ago when they started getting a lot of political blowback and blame…

> This would be an issue, but I dispute point 1 because the leaders of the tech industry would very much like to wash their hands of politics and be seen as neutral platforms so they can save money on moderation. No, they'd like to be approachable by the broadest groups possible (or really the broadest set of ad-viewing groups possible). Calls to violence are unappealing to most people. This is the reason unmoderated…

So why didn't they crackdown on this type of content back in the Obama administration when the threat of political blowback also wasn't there?

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#270

Post by mercurialshark » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #141

mercurialshark wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'll circle back with a longer form response in a few minutes. In the meantime, I find it interesting that people think down voting my comment will intimidate me into changing the analysis. That's not how legal judgment works. That's not how anything works...

Maybe they, like me, read the court's frankly damning opinion and didn't find that your fact-less argument from authority contributed to the discussion. 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 don't think responding in less than five minutes was unreasonable. It's also not legal advice, simply my personal opinion on some of the numerous issues that are likely to be litigated.

I also think this entire thread will be worth revisiting upon appeal.