Do you remember the court testimony where Zuckerburge avoided the entire question about if they collude with other companies to make these decisions on the backend?
Apple may have banned Parler and then Google just decided to go with it, followed by AWS. However, it may also be equally valid they colluded via private channels to make this happen. BOTH ARE EQUALLY POSSIBLE.
Discovery in this kind of lawsuit may lead to the answers. If they did collude, that is a strong argument for anti-trust. Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.
It honestly doesn't matter what you believe about Parler's user contributions. That's the entire point of Section 230. From what I've seen they do make a good faith attempt to delete all illegal posts with direct calls to violence. Section 230 doesn't prevent Google/Apple/Amazon from being forced to have them as customers.
You are protected if you're a minority and a business refuses to give you service based on that status. Opinions and viewpoints aren't protected, and maybe they should be.
If you in any way praise this legal yet blatant corporate censorship because it fits your views, you will be next. We are not on a slippery slope. We are in a god damn free fall. If you don't see it, they will come for you next and no one will be there to speak for you.
I've been on the internet since it started and every forum I've been on has removed users and or posts for a wide range of reasons. Including just being rude, as hackernews does. So I don't really see this as any kind of "free fall". It is just the usual way of things.
It's not the usual way of things. They're not removing a few individually flagged post. FB is erasing massive numbers of communities, many just because they lean right. Reddit deleting over 2,000+ subreddits in the past year is just business as usual?
No, that's fucking targeted attacks against opinions they do not like. This is absolutely not business as usual. Everything about this is massive and it's morally reprehensible. It may not be illegal, but it's fucking wrong and insane.
It also shows that Big Tech is afraid. They're afraid and they're cowards. Regulating speech and language and blanket censorship are tools of authoritarians, not of people who believe in democracy and liberty.
Show me a single nation where censorship lead to a more free and open State.
>Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.
It was a ride range to indicate how large it is and meant to illustrate a point. You're asking for a fact is really just a way to say "I don't like your opinion so I'm going to challenge something that's obviously intended as a hyperbole" to discredit your statement in some arbitrary way.
Alright, AWS may not own 80% of the market, but let's be fair; it's fucking massive. On top of that Cloudflair has taken down websites before. DigitalOcean and DreamHost have removed people's hosting with less than 24 hours notice[0]. NameCheap and GoDaddy have both revoked peoples domains with less than 24 hours notice[1].
Initial searches seem to show AWS owns 50% of the market by themselves. You add in DO, Azure and GCE and that number quickly climbs[2].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXuk-WSDDRw
Apple may have banned Parler and then Google just decided to go with it, followed by AWS. However, it may also be equally valid they colluded via private channels to make this happen. BOTH ARE EQUALLY POSSIBLE.
Discovery in this kind of lawsuit may lead to the answers. If they did collude, that is a strong argument for anti-trust. Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.
It honestly doesn't matter what you believe about Parler's user contributions. That's the entire point of Section 230. From what I've seen they do make a good faith attempt to delete all illegal posts with direct calls to violence. Section 230 doesn't prevent Google/Apple/Amazon from being forced to have them as customers.
You are protected if you're a minority and a business refuses to give you service based on that status. Opinions and viewpoints aren't protected, and maybe they should be.
If you in any way praise this legal yet blatant corporate censorship because it fits your views, you will be next. We are not on a slippery slope. We are in a god damn free fall. If you don't see it, they will come for you next and no one will be there to speak for you.