This is why telecommunications companies sign decades long leases at colo facilities. Because everyone who's worked at 111 eighth avenue knows what happens when big tech wants you out. There's no lease for cloud infrastructure and I don't know what collective psychosis made operations folks think that's a good idea. Was Amazon even obliged to give them 24-hours on the eviction notice? That sounds like just enough time for a small company to make sure they have an offline copy of the database. What was stopping Amazon from pushing a button that instantly deleted their ec2 virtual machines and then recalled their s3 glacier offsite tape backups for shredding too. This is a great reminder that even if you do all the "right things" in the cloud, it can all be taken away in a day because Ro Khanna tweeted at your provider. Western Union was destroyed for far less meddling and scheming than this and AT&T rose to power on the explicit promise to not do basically everything the tech giants have done these past two days, so maybe we'll see some disruption in the future.
> This is why telecommunications companies sign decades long leases at colo facilities.
Agree, but the messaging so far is well into "you violated our acceptable use policy which would nullify our lease if we had one" territory. Even telecom leases have carve-outs for "abuse", which is always defined in sufficiently vague terms.
Internet exchanges don't have acceptable use policies. Check out the Telehouse website and try to find their AUP page. If they did have one, it'd basically just say you can't use the peering point for illegal activity. Companies like Amazon are customers of exchanges and that's how they get to enjoy things like section 230 protections. But it's clearly "common carrier for me, not for thee" if you read their own policies, since the AWS AUP says "you're not allowed to host offensive content". Moral of the story is if you want your online business to be governed by law rather than aups, just buy a PC and drop it by an internet exchange and set up a contract with cogent or someone. Then you can't be destroyed because you displeased a politician on Twitter.
> Internet exchanges don't have acceptable use policies.
The traffic through an IX (like SIX) is governed by a rat's nest of bilateral peering agreements, and those bilateral agreements have AUPs.
Peering exchanges are nice, but are effectively a corner case optimization on the modern internet. You still need a default route from somebody, and the major carriers all refuse to sell default routes through peering exchanges (for understandable reasons).
Everybody who will sell you a link with a default route will insist on something vaguely similar to an AUP.
Autonomous systems don't depend on a default route. It's not difficult or expensive to set up a BGP router. The labels attached to these contracts and agreements are really beside the point. If you want to play the Internet game then it's worthwhile to play it as an equal. If you host your business in the cloud then Amazon has shown us today that they will delete you like a bad YouTube comment the moment people weep and wail on Twitter.
If you're going to do something like parler, your own tin, in your own building (with a contract that doesn't refer to any acceptable use), your own network range(s), your own AS, and fibres conncecting to multiple POPs.
Fibres and building contracts typically don't allow the service provider to cancel except for very specific cases (not paying the rent for example), and are long enough that alternatives can be sought ahead of schedule if the company no longer wants to deal with you.
