This is an interesting and somewhat irritating take by Greenwald. I'll just put a counterpoint to one point he made that I was careful to get a grasp of what was going on:
Greenwald [Today]> Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country
Greenwald [Jan 12]> The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet.
This is kind of along the right lines but gets the details wrong. Greenwald is intelligent, insightful, has good sources and is not afraid to annoy people, so it is tiresome that he has a bad habit of fudging details to make a shiny claim that is not quite right. With another journalist, I'd think what happened is the journalist was under pressure, so wrote up a story whose details they didn't quite follow, but with Greenwald, I am not sure what is going on. My least unlikely guess so far is that he rewards his sources with sympathetic coverage, which in this case he gave to Parler executives.
Some thoughts:
The big truth: The triple whammy from three of the four biggest tech firms, all of which have sophisticated lobbying operations, did indeed effectively cripple Parler.
The biggest error: None of the three companies were in competition with Parler. In my opinion, the businesses of both Google and Apple would benefit from a strong rival to Facebook and Twitter; Amazon has a close relationship with Twitter, so this is a little less clear, but on the face of it AWS should normally benefit from hosting a client. This was pointed out by many commentators on the Jan 12th post, but he repeats it today.
Continued mythmongering: Greenwald's Jan 12th story essentially misses the backstory on Parler's bad relationship with Amazon, who had for several weeks essentially refused to answer demands that they comply with their TOS. There is competition in the hosting business (Greenwald's characterisation of Amazon's dominance on jan 12th was itself an error), but I don't think any major hosting provider - e.g., neither Digital Ocean nor Hetzner have major lobbying operations - would have kept the left the servers up under the circumstances. I commented on this at the time on the HN thread of Greenwald's story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25759115 - to my knowledge Greenwald has not since given a more faithful account of Amazon's role.
[Today]: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-... (repeating your link)
[Jan 12]: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... Jan 12, 2021