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Parler, Web Hosts, and Masterpiece Cakes
Parler lost its rented server space with Amazon Web Services. Parler also found its phone apps booted off the Apple and Google app stores. This is not the “destruction” of Parler – not unless Parler was on such shaky ground that it cannot be rebuilt. This is certainly hamstringing it, but if this is a “death sentence”, then it is one that is easily overcome with cold hard cash (would that the Reaper were so easily fended off on more fleshly concerns). We need perspective here, and an honest reckoning of what happened, how, and why. We also need to yet again yank the plank from our own eye, for it was just a short while ago that we were adamantly defending another business for refusing paying clientele: I speak of none other than Masterpiece Cakes.
First, let’s get the technical stuff out of the way – understanding how Parler was built, and how it planned to make money for its creators (let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it was all charity work) is key to understanding its demise. Web sites have to be located on computers. You can make a website on your laptop and share it with the rest of the internet if you want. Users just would need to know the numerical address in either IPV4 or IPV6 to find it. If you want to make it easier to find then you would have to register a domain name, and then map that domain name to your server address. Now suppose your little website got really popular because its topic was fun and lovable – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your website was all about your pet bird. If you had just a residential internet connection, after a point your neighbors would start to complain that traffic to your laptop was killing their own connections. Plus, your laptop has limited processing power to keep serving page views out – and your addition of a little bird forum doubled traffic to the point where your laptop’s cooling fan failed from overuse. How do you fix these issues?
You scale up. You either pay your local ISP for a better connection that’s isolated from the neighborhood’s shared node, and has more bandwidth, or you take your overworked laptop somewhere that has a better hookup. And you replace the laptop with a server. Maybe several in a cluster that appear as one to outsiders (after all, you’ve got bird videos now too, and a bird podcast, and a bird supply store). You also need a moderator because you found your forum was being used to orchestrate illegal bird smuggling. Maybe, instead of spending all that money on equipment, you rent server space elsewhere – a web host who has an entire server farm just for this purpose- that way you can still run it from your home. But now, you no longer control your data – not fully. And it turns out the server host has some other rules in place too.
For one, this host says that he’s not going to accept liability for anything illegal with his clients’ websites, and he’s not going to act as relay (a forwarder) to porn sites, terrorist sites, animal cruelty, etc. Your moderator took care of the smuggling ring, but there’s a bird furry group that’s gotten weird, and (for reasons you cannot fathom) the image of Tweety Bird, once innocuous, has taken on a meme life of its own as a symbol for an unsavory political group. Your host notices that a lot of inbound traffic to your site is being relayed from some of these Tweety Bird groups, and warns you to deal with it or he’ll boot you.
The final straw was when several Bird Liberation Front affiliated members spent a long and seedy weekend warning about a coming war on Kentucky Fried Chicken and Tyson Chicken, and come Monday one of them shot two fast-food workers and tried to deep fry their shoes. The headlines wrote themselves: “Bird Brained Brawler, Egged On To Deep Fry Footwear.” Your host canceled your service. Do you have the (ahem) nest egg to now buy your own servers to get going again?
Unfair? Maybe, but you can hardly blame the web host for not wanting the liability or the publicity. Writ larger, this is Parler’s situation. They were built from the beginning on rented webspace through Amazon – they never controlled their own hardware. Worse for them, they relied heavily on creating a site that was primarily geared towards mobile access, through apps. Both their cloud host and the ecosystem for their apps come with all manner of terms and conditions under which they would do business.
Parler billed itself as being some sort of center for “free speech”, with hardly anything in the way of content moderation or dreaded “censorship”. From its launch, therefore, Parler was immediately peopled not just with users wanting to get away from the moral censoriousness of Twitter, but with all manner of other users – folks that would make Alex Jones look like the voice of cool reason. And such people did as such people do and began to trade in conspiracy theories – QAnon and more besides. Forbes noted over the weekend that the planning did, in fact, occur on Parler and other platforms. Parler had been warned repeatedly in the past months to deal with what AWS was seeing go across its servers, and had been warned by both Apple and Google that their app would be removed at some point. The storming of the Capitol, whose pre-planning was evident on Parler, was the last straw, making “at some point” into “right now”.
Parler made its choice not to moderate – I can tell you from my own time here as a moderator that moderation is necessary. Most users of Ricochet never saw the posts and members who would show up and start dropping racist and anti-semitic rants, or used their image libraries to stash pornography (Max has seen this), because they were eliminated quickly. You could deride that as “censorship” if you will – if you are determined to treat “censorship” as a universally dirty word.
But then again, wasn’t Masterpiece Cakes engaged in a different sort of “censorship”? Wasn’t Masterpiece Cakes honored for exercising their right not to serve clientele in ways found unconscionable? The persistent lunatic who kept suing Masterpiece at one time demanded a satanic cake with protruding sex toys. If we honor Masterpiece Cakes for refusing such clientele, why are Amazon, Apple, and Google condemned for refusing Parler’s business? For that is what they have done.
The lunatic who wanted the pornographic cakes in Colorado, we insisted, had every right to bake his own (quite literally) damned cake. By the same token, only money is hindering Parler from buying its own servers and internet connections, and firing it all back up again. As for the app stores? How long has Ricochet run without an app? And has anyone heard of jailbreaking IOS or sideloading apps on Android phones?
If Parler failed to examine the risks to its strategy when they started, that’s their problem. They wanted to become immediately as large as Twitter, but lacked the capital to do so. I’ve seen that sort of failure before in other businesses – we call it vaporware. Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon all started small, with narrowly defined markets and concepts, then grew from that base. They also learned on the way (and are still learning) through both failures and successes (anyone remember Google Circles?). Anyone hoping to unseat them should be prepared to do the same. Parler tried to jump in at the deep end without knowing how to swim, in a pool they didn’t own, while allowing others to dirty the pool. Now they’ve been thrown out. That’s business.
And nobody should be compelled to do business with them. Not unless you want Masterpiece Cakes to also bake pornographic cakes for a vengeful madman.
Published in Science & Technology
SkipSul,
Timely, informed, clearly written article, thanks!
A great analogy and a great post. It needed to be said. Not everyone is going to thank you for it, but many of us will. Thanks, SkipSul.
Well said, Skip. I don’t see how anyone can argue with your position.
Gab learned the hard way too.
I also think parler’s anti-trust complaint will likely have merit as well. Especially given the other anti-trust lawsuits affecting both apple and google. Even if they end up losing, the judges in the other lawsuits will know that they can just yeet their competition out of existence, and those justifications could become extraordinarily perfunctory. So Parler may lose their suit, but cause Epic to win theirs.
Skip you just gave me a internet lesson for Dummies. Thanks. As they say “follow the money”. Someone will someday contest the big technology companies when the money is right.
And when Jeff Bezos decides that legitimate political debate is to be suppressed, apparently by breach of contract, there will always be people who try to make his case sound like something less objectionable.
We need more players in these markets so these issues will solve themselves through competition. It will likely happen because even when the reasons for the disaffection are misplaced the marketplace is missing a service it demands.
It absolutely needed to be said.
It’s a common error in thinking, when people aim to compete with some popular product or service they’ve come to dislike or find wanting, that they must therefore immediately imitate their competitor at the same scale and splash. But if they lack the capital*, the expertise, and the battle scars, all they will create is a shoddy impersonation that is often worse than what they were trying to displace.
*And a solid rule of thumb in raising capital is this: Study how much money you will need on equipment, personnel, facilities, supplies, etc. Figure out what your expenses will be from day one, and your revenue streams, and plot out various curves over the coming months and years so that you have a rough idea of how long you’ll be losing money after you start before you hit break even and actually start making money. This should give you a rough idea of how much starting capital you need. Now….
Take a hard look at that figure. Remember it. Hold onto it. Laugh maniacally and throw all that planning in the trash, then take that figure you memorized and quadruple it. And pray.
I actually have little sympathy with Epic on this. They knew what they were doing – deliberately trying to slash the amount of money that they split with Apple by means of subterfuge.
I agree with your argument. Do we, as conservatives, support the principle of freedom of association? I certainly do. Government should not be allowed to force a business into engaging in a contractual relationship with another business. That should be a bedrock conservative view.
Was it Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “All analogies limp”?
A thoughtful and informative post. Thanks. But I don’t think a local vendor of a cake is the same as an international telecommunications monopolist. The baker knows what his religion demands. The giant corporation cannot do so, since there must be some employees who would support Parler.
I do agree that the server vendor is under no obligation to support violations of law. Far from it. But that is question begging. Have there been violations of law on Parler? If so, has Parler refused to cooperate with authorities? If that were the case, I would support the censors. In the meantime, I will continue to consider them woke fascists.
Oh, I agree. I will even go further. I think the whole think is CCP griefing. But the Sherman Anti-Trust act makes essentially all business illegal, and its going to come down to mostly arbitrary decisions about market definitions by the judge and arguments about market power. And what has the appearence of coordinated players to yeet a competitor out of existence may color those mostly arbitrary decisions.
That does change things. I was going to complain that Amazon gave Parler just 24 hours notice to secure servers elsewhere and transfer the data, which is impossible. But if Parler has known for months that this would likely happen and did not prepare, that’s on them.
The complication here is that no alternative server host is willing to contract with Parler. Is establishing one’s own server farm really just a matter of money?
Antitrust suits against Google have merits elsewhere (advertising especially)- but Parler has no case here. Anyone could in theory still load the Parler app onto an Android phone without using the Google Play store.
The better questions are with regards to web-hosting server farms and who owns them, DNS registrations, and physical backbone connections.
Yes. Just money.
Indeed – anytime someone comes out with some highly successful new product, they technically have a monopoly on it till others figure ways around it.
The hosts’ requirements for moderation are valid but, boy, are they pleased to have such a nice excuse to implement political speech censorship.
How many versions of this argument have we heard, each seemingly more determined to miss the point than the last.
The issue is not whether AWS may shut down Parler. It’s whether they should. At least that ought to be the issue for conservatives. Free speech is not just a thing in the Bill of Rights putting the government on notice. It’s also — supposed to be — a cultural value.
Somebody might argue that AWS, Google, and Apple are making a careful trade-off, that they value free speech even if they disagree with the content — honest, they do! — but, gosh darn it, some things are just beyond the pale. But that isn’t true. It’s not hard to see how selective their indignation is.
So the conservative argument is that Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook should be regarded as villains, not that they should be squashed by the far more terrible government. Maybe that’s weak sauce, I don’t know.
There’s another point to be made, too. Conservatives think you shouldn’t be forced to bake a cake with a d***o in it, the left thinks you should be; and vice versa for hosting Parler, or something. Why nowhere in this article do you castigate the left for its inconsistency? Why should only conservatives be forced to live up to the implications of our previous positions? Making conservatives live up to our own rules is their job, not ours.
That was the main question I had, too. The comparison just seems a little out of proportion. In fact, we would not be having this controversy at all if there were other servers in the market for the conservative politics Twitter, Facebook, et al are intent on censoring. Masterpiece Cakes didn’t enjoy that status.
This was Google’s first server – their proof of concept.
And this was their first “real” server cluster in 1999. Yes, if you were using Google in the early 2000s, your traffic was routed through here.
Well, no. Technically speaking jailbreaking your iPhone is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I’m not a lawyer, but in the simple terms I understand both the CFAA and Apple architecture this seems to be a law that’s not enforced, not a legal action. If a cop never stops me for driving two miles an hour over the speed limit I’m still in violation of the law.
Two, as I understand it antitrust law doesn’t demand a hundred percent domination of the market place. Let’s suppose that every plumber in the State of Wisconsin was in an association, one that refused to do business with me. If I busted my toilet I could contract with someone from the Twin Cities, but I’d be paying the plumber for an hour and a half of driving both ways to get out here. Technically speaking I can still repair the porcelain throne, but it imposes a significant cost on me. Do I know how to side-load apps onto my android phone? I don’t. Do options exist? Sure, but forcing me to go through them applies a significant time and effort cost on me, which I think brings us into the realm of antitrust law. Now, I have problems with the way that the law works in this case, but this seems like exactly the sort of case wherein it’s warranted.
This also seems like a Section 230 debate on another level; much like we’ve been complaining about Twitter for banning content they arbitrarily deem objectionable, I don’t see why we can’t complain about Google & Apple banning services which provide content they deem objectionable.
This!
If I recall (no guarantee) when the Masterpiece Cakes guy initially turned away the gay wedding cake he also provided a recommendation for another baker who could help out the potential client. If Parler can’t find another web hosting alternative then it’s hardly an analogous case. Public accommodation laws exist because of the cases where, if the only hotel in town won’t rent you a room, what are you supposed to do, make a snow cave? Masterpiece Cakes wasn’t in that position, AWS might be.
What’s with bad mouthing conspiracy theories? Complete and perfect knowledge is a rare thing and conspiracy theories fill in the gap.
As for comparing a baker with Amazon, let me know when you find a baker with a 50% market share.
Well argued Skip. However I am going to take issue. The difference, to me, is that there are dozens of other bakers beside Masterpiece to whom one could go. Does the same apply to the Google and Apple Store? Is there a genuine alternative to Amazon Web Services? I’d contend that the monopoly power of these companies and their collusion on this issue makes a world of difference.
And as regards your argument about limiting liability…isn’t that why section 203 exists? Does that not already limit Twitter/Amazon/Google liability?
And lastly, step away from the law itself. The Government only guarantees protections for free speech from it’s own depradations, but society can’t work with just that. We also need a culture where it’s embraced as a principle, otherwise there is no such thing regardless of the bill of rights. This includes the government, naturally, but also Amazon, the churches, and the low down dirty dogs on Reddit who have been busy selling out friends and family to the FBI for participating in the Capital Demonstration (yes, that’s a thing.) Amazon, Apple, Google, et al. may have the legal right to do what they just did. They do not have the moral right.
Shame on them.
And one whose competitors act in concert with it. That damn bakers’ guild!
The only people I ever see on TV who are more pitiful than the Congress critters are the big tech CEO’s. I don’t watch but it is difficult to avoid a still shot of those lying critters, don’t ask me which ones.
Kind of a modern myth there. Newspapers once dominated how we got our news – and had the right to print or not print whatever they wanted – but even there within certain bounds. If you wanted to print a story that the papers wouldn’t touch, you paid a private printer to do so as pamphlet – but even the private printers always had the right to refuse the business if what they were asked to print was salacious, repugnant, or otherwise disreputable.
To this day either businesses have that right or they don’t. That is the issue.
If you’re demanding I somehow defend Parler itself and its “hands off” policies, that I will not do. They announced that Parler was a free for all, and refused to deal with nutcases and conspirators there. That’s on them. I’ll not defend “Conservative Twitter” for merely being a conservative sewer instead a liberal one.
I am writing for an audience here that has bound itself up in knots of anxiety that somehow the defenestration* of Parler is somehow a sign of the end times, to point out that it is no such thing, and that Parler is a sewer of whose loss I will lose no more sleep than I would if Alex Jones were to vanish in a Jersey swamp.
But if you wish to cover liberal inconsistencies, in the famous words of others here:
Go write your own post.
*As for “defenestration of Parler, I’m probably being unfair. They wouldn’t be that incompetent to run their stuff on Windows servers, would they?
Not saying we cannot complain, but let’s keep the complaints proportionate and directed at the right issues.