Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 652 posts

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

#291

Post by gowld »

throwaway45349 wrote: post #11
freedomben wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you listen to the Megyn Kelly interview with Parler's CEO, they did expect this and had a second entirely different hosting provider lined up. They would have made the move by the deadline too, except the second hosting provider also dropped them due to extreme pressure.

I do believe that should've also been in their threat model - these guys should've acted like they were hosting The Pirate Bay 2 given the state of American politics. For instance, they could've had a low-traffic backup in read-only mode, or prevent new sign-ups. Or have an application layer switch to reduce outgoing bandwidth (HTML only) to squeeze into a coloc facility on short notice.

The Pirate Bay team explicitly mocked them for this.

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

#292

Post by barbacoa »

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…

>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.

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.

https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/

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

#293

Post by fjabre »

gowld wrote: post #285
fjabre wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a bunch of State puppets who do the State's bidding in almost all cases. Each state gets numbers by its population. Great. Forefathers intended it this way. I think that's fair. It stops a giant mob from overpowering the system. Unless you take over the Post office and use it as a voting system, which dems clearly did here. I don't think a direct democracy would work in the US. I like representative democra…

> Each state gets numbers by its population. This is false, and the core of the criticism of the EC. Each state gets 2 votes independent of its population, which is biased toward small population states, and for over a century the definition of states was constrained by a compromise to protect slavery .

California has more electors than Vermont.

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

#294

Post by zaltekk »

barbacoa wrote: post #292
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…

>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. They haven't released the actual contract itself but from what Parler said in their lawsuit, they had a clause in their contract…

The contract is the standard Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy to which it refers.

As mentioned above, they don’t have to give you 30 days before suspending for violating the AUP.

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

#295

Post by fjabre »

joelkevinjones wrote: post #290
fjabre wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a bunch of State puppets who do the State's bidding in almost all cases. Each state gets numbers by its population. Great. Forefathers intended it this way. I think that's fair. It stops a giant mob from overpowering the system. Unless you take over the Post office and use it as a voting system, which dems clearly did here. I don't think a direct democracy would work in the US. I like representative democra…

What do you mean by saying that democrats took over the post office? I assume you mean the USPS? The postmaster general was appointed by Trump. The senate until just last week had a Republican majority. Exactly how did the Democrats exercise power to "take over"?

Dems pushed the use of the USPS as a general voting system. Terrible idea.

The USPS was not designed this way.

Dems knew they could leverage their population dense cities to win this using USPS.

To say that one side is clean and the other is corrupt is clearly incorrect. They both cheat. They both cheat a lot. The dems just cheated better this time.

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

#296

Post by Someone1234 »

mercurialshark wrote: post #270
Someone1234 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't think responding in less than five minutes was unreasonable.

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.

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

#297

Post by fjabre »

takeda wrote: post #283
fjabre wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just pointing out it's quite clear that the nation itself is left leaning. That's honest by the numbers. To say the Republicans have any kind of advantage right now except for maybe the courts is incorrect.

They had to lose by 7 million votes to actually lose, I would say they have quite advantage. As another user said: "The Senate is split 50-50, but the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people than the 50 Republicans"

We are a representative democracy for a reason. It was designed that way.

You can't change the rules of the game because you're losing.

The United States was designed as a representative democracy on purpose by the forefathers. That is fact.

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

#298

Post by pmoriarty »

tw04 wrote: post #263
mercurialshark wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"monopolistic behavior" is behavior that leverages a company's dominant position in the market to hurt its competition.

The contrary is the case here. If anything, AWS is helping its competition by giving them Parler's users.

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

#299

Post by vlunkr »

umvi wrote: post #278
vlunkr wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers So charge them more or limit their compute? If you are in the business of renting out compute resources then you need to spell out what the terms are. It's like renting out your car and then getting mad when someone drives it 2000 miles in one weekend. You need to spell out: "Yep, it's $50 a day, and you get 100 miles per day. Every mi…

Sure we could have done that, but allow me to use a dumb analogy here. I could go to the grocery store and try to buy the entire stock of milk. They would probably refuse to sell them to me, and would be within their rights to do so, even though they didn't put a sign specifically saying I couldn't do that. I could complain that they should just keep more milk in stock, but they won't, because I'm not the customer they want to sell to.

Businesses (in the US) can refuse service to anyone for essentially any reason besides discrimination. Why should hosting a server for someone be any different. Most services are going to put something generic in their TOS to accomplish this, because they can't enumerate or foresee every way that people might do something undesirable.

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

#300

Post by belorn »

ojnabieoot wrote: post #45
unethical_ban wrote: post #3

I've been trying to come to grips with the societal impact of echo chambers, "hate" speech, and the obligations vs. rights of sites and hosting providers. So far, my take is that websites have less obligation than hosting. It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues - I am leaning more and more to the idea that colos, IaaS and ISPs should be considered common carriers, and that only a c…

I am very sympathetic to the idea that ISPs should be common carriers, but definitely not colos and platforms like AWS. Let’s use an old-fashioned analogy. An ISP is like a post office, and people’s letters should not be meddled with (outside of violent threats or pursuant to a legal criminal investigation). In particular, ISPs are relevant to most individuals and ISPs (should) have respect for individual rights. But…

If there existed a single paper mill company that held 95% of the market, and they decided to refuse selling paper to a news paper, then I would consider that a problem. It might not look like censorship, but the practical effect is very much similar. In theory a news paper could go out and buy land, grow trees, cut them down, and mill them into sawdust, and chemically treat that sawdust in order to turn it into paper, and then finally press it and print it, but the likely outcome is almost deterministic.

Thankfully we do not have that situation. Everything from forestry, wood cutters, sawmills, paper mills, printing presses and distribution is very much decentralized and have a healthy market with plenty of competition. It is so healthy that unless something is actually illegal, no one can stop someone from printing what they want. At most a company can do is create a small inconvenience.

Server hosting is not that healthy but buying your own servers is much easier than producing paper, and the retail side of server hardware is healthy enough that preventing someone from buying servers would not be feasible. AWS does however have a demonstrated market power over companies that is very unhealthy so in my view they sit somewhere between a common carrier style regulated monopoly and a regular large company. If their decision to ban parler would have had minor effect on parler then we would not be having this conversation.

Post reply on HN