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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
Thorough analysis, but it ignores the fact that 3 of the biggest tech companies apparently acted in concert to disappear Parler as thoroughly as Syme disappeared from the Ministry of Truth; at least for the moment. This is not intended to ignore that Parler’s CEO is everywhere on Fox, happy to sketch out his version of the disappearance without providing the background that you’ve laid out in this post. But this does not obscure the fact that Google, Apple and, most egregiously, Amazon took their actions in one 72-hour period against a potential rival in the social media space, just as that rival began to flourish.
Facebook is doing this as well. They suspended Ron Paul’s page; here’s what he said that they didn’t like:
“In short, US government elites have been partnering with “Big Tech” overseas for years to decide who has the right to speak and who must be silenced. What has changed now is that this deployment of “soft power” in the service of Washington’s hard power has come home to roost.”
It’s going all around, a real show of power.
In the wake of the Capital storming, though, it was at least an understandable reaction.
In any case, Parler is no rival of Amazon or Apple (Google is another matter) – they do not compete. And Bezos is a mercenary – everyone in the tech industry knows this.
You cannot argue that Apple was somehow protecting Facebook or Twitter either – Apple and Facebook are at loggerheads over Facebook’s privacy invasions (a war I hope Facebook loses badly – they certainly are losing the PR war in that fight with their two-faced ad-buys). And though Apple was at one time friendly with Twitter, there is little love lost there either for similar reasons – apple used to provide account embedding in MacOS and IOS for both services, and yanked those years ago for a wide assortment of abuse ranging from privacy to unauthorized contact skimming. Apple has been pretty consistent in its actions when it comes to policing apps.
Google is a different case, and their own history belies any reasons they would give.
Is SkipSul Tristan Harris?
Who?
I don’t get why anyone who wanted to run a conservative web site would not just run it from their own platform. Say, a stack of blade servers and a connection directly to AT&T.
Money and ambition. Parler didn’t have enough of the former, but a lot of the latter.
It’s possible to respect the right of private companies to do business with people they prefer and also to recognize that they are monopolies and are acting like monopolies and ought to be broken up using anti-trust law.
That still leaves us with the real dirty laundry, the businesses providing services that verge on essential in today’s environment that, as soon as they realize they have some monopolistic market power, enlist the government and vice-versa to expand that power base. Ron Paul’s pointing to this unholy alliance got him dispatched from Facebook.
No, the reaction, and most of the outrage, is manufactured by the same people who have been promoting racist BLM/Antifa domestic terrorism for several months. This is the fascist alliance between Democrats and Big Tech not wasting a ”crisis”, and those eager to enable or justify it because they believe it suppresses right of center perspectives they hate, but cannot convince other conservatives to join in a witch hunt against.
Okay. Although conservatives ought to be skeptical of antitrust regulation.
What is it you propose to break up? AWS? How? And remember: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Google — ostensibly independent firms — are acting in concert. What difference would breaking them up make?
The outrage, here, in my view, is that these firms are lying about what they are. They paint themselves as neutral platforms for expression and such, but they don’t act that way. Is that a legal problem? Probably not. But they certainly should be punished for it.
I’m pretty worried that it’s too late for any punishment. We’re stuck asking which is the lesser of two evils: Big Tech or Big Government. The government has more guns. On the other hand, the question may be irrelevant, since in reality these are not opposed entities. The government likes Big Tech, and the feeling is mutual.
I am not troubled by twitter bans, etc. Perhaps some will just go back to their private lives and things will settle down. It may not be all bad. I find the ability to discriminate important. I wish there were still smoking sections in resturants. Not because I smoke, I don’t, but because they are privately owned places that pay taxes. Diversity cannot be accomplished without discrimination.
Why not, if it’s a better movie than what does get the Oscar? I’ve often suspected suppression or at least discrimination against what I thought were better movies.
This was an argument from our side, of course. Hollywood doesn’t like our values. But sometimes those values are still in the movies.
As usual with a St. A. comment, you’re very reasonable. It’s more than okay to complain about what got the Oscar and what shouldn’t have won the Oscar. Oliver! over 2001: A Space Odyssey? We’re still fighting that one, 52 years later.
What’s new and different are PC objections to what got nominated. If a Black actor that the reviewer likes didn’t get the nomination, now it’s called a snub, to be denounced in screaming prose. The tone is, How dare they!
What’s the litany for a losing sports team?
You try to beat the other team, but if you fail that, you try to beat the refs.
At least that’s one version I’ve heard.
No it isn’t.
There was more storming after the RNC convention.
I recognize that any argument that points to coincidence or concurrence without specific proof is too much like Trump’s stolen election cry. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that collusion engaged in in order to protect a monopoly position is open to a less rigorous standard (note: I’m not a lawyer). There’s way too much coincidence here to be ignored. And its effects could be quite scary if they were ignored.
I get the argument you’re making, but I wonder if there are some distinctions between Masterpiece and the tech lords that you’re not taking into account. I’m not sure, I’m just wondering. Maybe we should suss out some of those distinctions.
I’m not entirely sure that these questions and issues undermine your argument, but I also don’t think the moral and legal equivalence between Masterpiece and the tech lords is as straightforward as you make it out to be.
Maybe I missed a link or something. What’s the source on this? I heard that Amazon or someone had accused them along those lines and they’d denied it in their suit. Just came across this link. I don’t know anything.
https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-glenn-greenwald-says-tech-giants-not-parler-hosted-the-majority-of-capitol-hill-riot-planning
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like.shtml
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/apple-threatens-ban-parler
And then there was the psycho Lin Wood, one of their “blue checkmark” people, who was actually calling for violence – took a lot before Parler finally banned him.
Again it bears saying: that other platforms did a poor or non existent job of moderating does not excuse Parler from doing likewise, especially when they had been warned repeatedly months before their final suspension.
Is there an explanation or an account anywhere for why there has not been a major FBI investigation of the criminal plots being hatched on Parler? I’ve looked and not detected that’s happening.
Outside the scope, and beside the point. I addressed this earlier.
Shareholder stuff is likewise outside the bounds. This is far more straightforward – a supplier (AWS or Masterpiece) has the right to refuse to serve certain clientele who make unethical demands on the supplier. I don’t care what Twitter is or is not doing here.
Likewise AWS said Parler could remain if they implemented a moderation policy that dealt with violence and extreme obscenity – in effect said they could have “any cake in the shop” but could not push the bounds of what AWS had repeatedly said was allowed. Parler’s CEO, months before, only reluctantly admitted that he needed to at least ban people for scatalogical photos.
Again it bears saying: that other platforms did a poor or non existent job of moderating does not excuse Parler from doing likewise, especially when they had been warned repeatedly months before their final suspension.
No, I will continue to demand equal standards, not maliciously disingenuous double standards that exist to provide cover for collusion between woke corporations against conservatives.
If these conditions are truly as alleged by AWS and used by @skipsul as substance in this OP, why has there not been any public news of a major criminal investigation of the entities plotting all these criminal acts on the internet?
Why do work when you can ride the narrative?
So, if you get pulled over for speeding, should the cop let you off because others were speeding and he didn’t also pull them over?
Well, speeding is a legal offense itself and not a suitable comparative. What AWS did here is in line with inconsistent actions among the several platforms we have been discussing because the same types of offenders are allowed to continue on the platforms as long as they are not identified as conservatives, Trump supporters, or promoting matters that assist those forbidden causes. Do you support that as an acceptable business practice?
Funny, cuz if you are black and the cops only pull over black people, the answer yes.
Skip # 171,
Thanks!
I still don’t know anything about the facts, except your bit about Lin Wood.
Apple received complaints, which as far I know could mean anything. And Amazon accused while Parler denies, which I had already heard of.
It means the world that you have a consistent standard on what should be condemned.