91–100 of 143 posts
forcing voters to shut up in a time of increasing polarisation will always get you more polarisation, or worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In general people should be aware of the risks of offsourcing to the cloud... especially when your business model is odious and immoral. I could imagine a future where religion makes a massive resurgence and homosexuality is deemed "odious and immoral". So then Grindr and friends should all be able to be kicked off of their cloud hosting and forced to self-host... right?
Honestly: fuck off. Anti-semtism is immoral and homosexuality is not. Homosexuality is protected under civil rights laws while racists are not. So no, kicking off a business for catering to homosexuals should be (and in many cases is) illegal. It should not be illegal to kick off a business for catering to Nazis. This false equivalence is bullshit and you are perfectly aware that it’s bullshit.
The real concern here is having Big Tech decide what you’re allowed to believe in. AWS et al should be treated as a public utility not bound by a private TOS, unless you want AWS to control what information you receive and who you can associate with.
I believe companies should have a right to have a terms of service and to act on those terms of service. They do it every day. Parler can still buy some servers and host a website and use mobile web. If Google took the step to block them with Chrome then I think I would have issue with that.
> Parler can still buy some servers and host a website and use mobile web. Does renting Linode VMs or Digital Ocean droplets count? Because they can cut Parler off just as easily as Amazon. Do they literally have to buy physical servers and host them on their own property somewhere? But then how do they get connected to the internet without going through some privately owned ISP that might cut them off? How do they r…
Even if you bought your own physical servers, you still need an agreement with an internet carrier and a colocation facility.
Renting a Linode is a convenient shortcut but you need that one contract with Linode. Linode can, does, and should enforce terms of service.
You can run a website off your home internet connection with a $20 raspberry pi, but your ISP can, does, and should enforce terms of service.
In theory you could become an ISP by entering into a peering agreement with other ISPs. Internet providers do this. Those ISPs will have their own terms, some of them may not regard content but I expect all of them would specifically defer to local law regarding the transported content.
"Bulletproof hosting" is the concept being discussed here. It is literally named that way because armed government agents coming to shut the site down or confiscate servers will be resisted.
Now call me a fanatical sheep, but if one think it's necessary to have that kind of hosting to get their political stories, they might just be seeking out extremely radical sources.
Completely obliterating these platforms is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes - and this is my caveat - we should be keeping a tight rein on hate speech, on inciting violence, and on death threats. But, and this is key to me, these kinds of things are the minority of discussion occurring, and should be treated as the outliers they are.
For better or worse, these platforms are the public squares of the internet; if people can't speak freely there, they can't speak freely on the internet. Private company or not, they have a monopoly on what speech appears on the internet, and an individual's right to free speech should be regulated accordingly.
No, with caveats. Apple and Google, fine. That’s distribution. They have a lot of distribution power, but that’s an antitrust question. AWS pulling the plug is infrastructure being yanked, and that’s more concerning. It takes Parler off the web. That’s closer to silencing than removing an amplifier. Nobody should be forced to provide services to the likes of Parler. But cutting them off with hours’ notice is excessiv…
If the activity is illegal, AWS can cut off service.
They are all private companies. They are free to choose who to do business with. If Parler broke the ToS, then there's even more reason for Amazon/Apple/Google to cut ties.
Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all break Amazon/Apple/Google TOS pretty clearly and yet are still allowed to exist. Clearly, Parler has been singled out by Big Tech. I can’t be the only one here actually concerned about Big Tech being the ultimate arbiter of truth and information. AWS is effectively public infrastructure at this point and must be treated as such unless you want to careen into a corporate dystopia wher…
I am no Trump supporter or conservative - I find it ridiculous that I feel the need to preface that - but I can’t be the only one that is surprised at how willing people are to accept Big Tech becoming the arbiter of truth and acceptable political viewpoints. From the calls to violence on Facebook, to the terrorists on Twitter, to the hardcore pornography on Reddit, plenty of platforms break Apple’s, Google’s, or Ama…
I honestly think this discussion "should they or shouldn't they ban x" is a poor framing of the discussion we should be having. It implies media companies can be unbiased. It implies there is some democracy implicit in social media. It implies that the right virtues can make social media work. I don't think any of those things are true and I don't think we should have a discussion that allows their presumption.
What people are doing on Twitter isn't new. What Twitter is doing isn't new. What people on Parler are doing isn't new. What Parler is doing isn't new. People who believe it is new simply have an incorrect understanding of history. They underestimate the gross bias in media historically. They underestimate the volume and extremity of seditious communication and activity. They underestimate the violence and frequency of political unrest.
If we want to have a real conversation about disassociating power and speech, disassociating money and speech, disassociating status quo and speech, I think that's a worthy conversation. The rest of this is red meat for slacktivist posters.
Apple & Google I've no issue with, outside the generic issue with Apple being the only app distribution provider for iPhones. But that should (IMO) be handled through regular anti-trust law.
AWS is more an infrastructure service. I don't necessarily think that they should be held to be a utility. But the logical continuation (if Parler build their own datacenter, will ISPs peer with them?) does lead to problems if the answer is "no". ISPs should be Title II common carriers, and peering should be non-discriminatory. Just like i wouldn't support an electric company turning off their power or a gas company turning off their heat, I don't think ISPs should be allowed to discriminate based on content (except in the case of protocol headers explicitly set by the client to allow such discrimination, such as the IPv4 Type Of Service field or the IPv6 Traffic Class field).
So the real question for me is "is AWS big enough to be regulated as a utility/common carrier?" I lean towards "no" at this point, given that there are several alternatives.