Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler

it's starting to feel like someone is tightening the screws on the tech companies. that is, if one wants to provide a charitable explanation for their decisions this past year. it's pretty surreal to see tech sector's lockstep march.

I'd be willing to bet almost anything that the latter have been far more demonstrably toxic than all but the darkest corners of the Internet. Because they have a huge captive audience and have been operating as toxic bad faith actors lying and pandering to the prejudices of low information audiences for decades now.

We don't just need a conversation about Twitter, or even about Google. Or Apple.

We also need a conversation about Fox and the rest, and the fact that a tiny handful of corporations control TV content, movies, music, book publishing, print of other kinds, and so on.

In the bigger picture, Twitter is practically a small indie platform.

1. Twitter picking political winners and losers, where they ban some accounts like Trump but allow others (like the Chinese or Iranian government, like BLM associated rioters, etc.) to post whatever they want.

2. Collusion between different tech companies all adopting the same policy in lock step, with no real choice (no real market competition) for customers as a result since all of them are making identical political choices.

3. Censorship and deplatforming moving down the stack into the operating systems of phones. Let's be honest, Apple's 24 hours was a meaningless gesture that affords Parler no time.

As always, an incident like this is used by those with power to normalize exercising even more power. It happened after 9/11 and it is happening again here now. Glenn Greenwald has a great article on this recent capitol riot (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702575) and it highlights the parallels between our reaction to this incident today and the reactions seen post-9/11.

Personally, I think the trend towards discarding free speech principles in favor of heavy censorship will keep continuing. I will not be surprised if Apple and Google start censoring what websites and IP addresses you can access. The answer can't just be "go build your own competitor" when one side with political and technical power is going to keep deplatforming you at lower and lower levels of the stack. It is not feasible for someone to build their own phone or operating system, and even the Android co-founder (!) tried exactly this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Phone)

For there to be choice, the biggest tech companies must be split up. And those whose service depends on network effects must be regulated when their network is above a certain size, because they can be as influential a power broker as a government. Twitter and Facebook (and others) are examples of this, and they can't just be treated like just any other private company. These days I feel like speech in the public sphere only exists if it exists on one of these platforms that are in wide use. We need to regulate them so that they are required to carry all speech that does not explicitly break the law.