Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

At least, that's what I heard during the debates about deplatforming Parler. It was apparently very bad for private companies to decide that a customer was engaging in distasteful but legal actions. What is the principled argument that it was not okay for AWS to take down Parler but it's okay for AWS to take down NSO?

Only if someone was one of the many people who don't understand what Free Speech is or incorrectly think of rights only in terms of themselves and people they like, not for those who they don't. In this case, Amazon is exercising their own Free Speech rights. Free speech necessarily (and as a matter of law) means the freedom to not speak and to not associate with other people. If I want to lend my support to a specific candidate with a sign in my field, I necessarily must have the right to refuse signs by everyone else. If the government puts a gun to my head and forces me to let every single candidate put a sign in my field, then the effect is no special endorsement for anyone and a flagrant violation of my free speech rights.

Someone denying another person the use of their own private property because of disapproval over their behavior doesn't generally mean any free speech issues, quite the contrary. As always there are certainly very rare edge cases, but none of them apply to a situation like this. Amazon refusing business to someone due to their race or gender or the like would be a problem, but "spies working with authoritarians" is not a Protected Class.

>What jurisdiction’s laws were broken by this company?

Why would that matter? Amazon isn't the government. They aren't threatening with force/arresting/jailing/killing the NSO Group, just refusing to continue their business relationship. So they aren't restricted to caring about only illegal behavior. In fact a core part of the whole point of free speech is to move consequences into the realms of social and economic, rather then force, not to eliminate all consequences entirely. There are a few limited legal instances they can't discriminate over. Otherwise they can deal with whomever the hell they want.

Most of it actually wasn't FWIW, hateful extremist content is generally perfectly legal free speech. "Incitement" gets used way, way too often on the internet, almost nothing that gets posted online is legal incitement. But neither "Big Tech" (such a dumb term) nor Hacker News nor a random forum on birds needs any violation of law or anything else to moderate what gets posted on their sites. It doesn't have to be "negative" or whatever at all even. There is nothing illegal or objectionable about someone who likes discussing trains for example. But if you post lots just about trains on a birder forum they may delete all your posts and ask you to stop because they want to focus on birds, and if you continue to do so they can delete everything and ban you. Why would there be anything wrong with that?

Private society looking at extremist content and saying "we're not going to shoot you over it but we do strongly object and we're going to socially ostracize you and deny you business and our support in any way we can" is free speech working as intended.

>Is "seems like" enough of a reason now for private companies to choose not to contract with other private companies?

Uh, yeah? People can refuse to do business with each other for nearly any reason at all, and definitely for anything other people merely say or do (at least, within the bounds defined by any existing contracts, but Amazon has covered its bases pretty well there to put it mildly).