Parler was funded by a billionaire. They did not need to depend on someone else's computers (AWS and Twilio). They could have hosted things themselves and reached their audience.
The highway is people typing parler.com in their browser, which was never interrupted. Parler could have made their own exit on the highway instead of telling people to take the exit for Amazon or Twilio.
And in the history of the world, this ability to reach everyone in the world was not possible until a couple decades ago.
So at what point do you say that is no longer the case?
1. Moderators of groups on social networks have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own group.
2. Social network companies have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must build your own social network.
3. Datacenter as a service companies have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must build your own datacenter.
4. ICANN has no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own internet.
5. Payment processors have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own financial system.
6. A country no obligation to let you speak in a space it controls. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own country.
I personally think 1 is obviously fine, it starts getting slightly iffy at 2, quite sketchy and worrying at 3, and 4 is where major alarm bells start ringing. Do you agree that it goes from fine at 1 to a major problem at 6, and merely disagree on where exactly on the road between 1 and 6 we should push back, or do you think 6 is perfectly fine?
#4 is a problem. ICANN should be like a utility (and as far as I know, it sort of is for now).
#5 is also a problem, although I believe this should also be a utility. Although, as I understand the Fed is coming out with their own thing soon, but I don’t know if it will be treated as a utility.
#6 is, of course, way far gone.
#1 to #3 are the domain of private enterprises, but at #4 it becomes infrastructure like roads, water, gas, etc and you can’t feasibly have more than one so it should be treated as a utility.
Alright, fair enough. AWS pitches itself as basically a utility, and so treating it as a utility when it's convenient for Amazon and as a fully private service when it's not strikes me as sketchy, but yeah that's more a complaint about Amazon's deceptive advertising than anything else.
If it really stops at 3 that's probably fine -- we'll see some new IAAS providers that accept money in exchange for not taking down content that is legal but some people don't like, the would-be censors will get mad but not be able to do anything about it, and that will be that. However, I expect that what will actually happen is the next social media site that is considered problematic and can't be cut off at the IAAS level because it self-hosts will be blocked off at either the DNS level or the payment processor level. Hopefully I'm wrong. Time will tell.
The highway is people typing parler.com in their browser, which was never interrupted. Parler could have made their own exit on the highway instead of telling people to take the exit for Amazon or Twilio.
And in the history of the world, this ability to reach everyone in the world was not possible until a couple decades ago.