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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
#s 177 through 179,
In this case, it’s more like the cops are only pulling over Republicans. If they’re actually speeding, being pulled over is in itself no injustice. But inconsistent application of the rules is.
What Saint Augustine said.
Especially when my speeding consisted of 3 miles over the limit, while the group that reported me for speeding was going 30 miles past the limit, everyday, while the corrupt cop smiled and waved at them. And people are pretending that this isn’t a big deal because one of thirty bumper stickers on my car has something they don’t like on it*
Anybody else experiencing trouble trying to reply with quotes?
*I don’t actually have any bumper stickers on my car; even were I so inclined, my car would get keyed by someone who thinks I’m intolerant.
Gizmodo has Amazon’s official statements to the court. Parler is demanding an emergency injunction to get back online. Amazon’s list of stuff that violated their ToS is sad reading. Death threats and worse.
Has AWS been consistent in their treatment of other customers? That’s the operative question. Otherwise you’re speculating.
Not really the allegations against Parler. To keep the speed limit metaphor going, Amazon is saying Parler was doing 105 in a 60, driving on the shoulder to pass people, and when the cops tried to pull them over they flipped off the cop and sped up to 130, running a few cars off the road in the process.
Ok, but I don’t know what to make of that. I assume Gizmodo is some thing online where I could read the official statements, which I doubt I can make time to read. From what I heard (specifically, my wife’s report of YouTube lawyer guy Viva Frei’s commentary on the situation), Parler denied what Amazon accused it of.
It would seem that, based strictly on what very little I can gather, all we can say for sure is that leftists have inconsistent standards and that the internet has jerks.
Is Twitter another customer, or do they have their own servers?
Based on the report I linked yesterday (an allegation echoed by Shapiro), the evil deeds of Jan. 6 were planned on Facebook and Twitter. Plus the “kill Trump” hashtag recently trending, or whatever it was.
[Sigh.]
If only Sidney Powell had released the literal Kraken, we could have avoided all of this.
I am not sure – I have seen that it’s a bit of both.
If only that stupid march last week hadn’t happened.
As in, Twitter does have some server space leased from Amazon?
Then it would seem that Amazon is indeed not treating its customers equally–if certain allegations are correct.
Yes! I can do it if I highlight either the entire post or the part I want to respond to. But just hitting the reply button isn’t working – at least not for me.
So say we all.
I’m sorry everyone’s having trouble. But I must admit that it is nice to know I’m not the only one.
Managed to get in a few minutes of hanging out with my wife with this on.
The second paragraph of the Parler response to the Amazon response to the Parler lawsuit seems . . . important.
I think it’s still fair to say that I don’t know anything. But if this paragraph is correct, it would seem to weigh rather heavily against Amazon’s claims about Parler.
It’s only “beside the point” if equal treatment under the law is beside the point. Part of your argument is to highlight the inconsistency of conservatives in their reaction to the tech lords versus their reaction to Masterpiece. I think equal treatment under the law mitigates the essential inconsistency in conservatives that you’re complaining about. No one would have cared if the gay community in Colorado had, say, boycotted Masterpiece. But the fact that the coercive powers of the state were brought to bear alters some of the fundamental considerations.
I think the flaw in all of this is that you’re failing to make a distinction between compelled speech and viewpoint discrimination. One of these things is not like the other. What Masterpiece refused to do was to be compelled to “speak” in support of something he didn’t believe. He didn’t try to suppress the gay couple’s right to speak or to even to deny their use of one of his existing cakes in whatever way they saw fit. He was happy to give them the platform, so to speak, to say whatever they wanted but they themselves had to say it.
What Amazon, Twitter, et al are doing is viewpoint discrimination. It’s a distinction worth noting. They’re denying access to the platform and saying, in effect, “get out of our store”. Now, the debate about whether de facto tech monopolies should be allowed to engage in viewpoint discrimination can certainly be had. But it is simply not the case that using a platform offered as a vehicle for speech amounts to compelling the speech of the platform provider.
Again, you are making a different argument that is outside the scope of the supplier / customer argument I am pointing out. I know well what you are arguing, I disagree that it has any validity here at all.
@keithlowery:
I have been pondering your argument, and let me express my objections more fully:
The problem with the Masterpiece Cakes case and “Compelled Speech” is that Speech was actually one of the last lines of defense in the case. The bigger problem (one the courts whiffed on touching) is that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) is itself a legal abomination – that it was also run by a political hack, though, is what saved Cakes. The CCRC was clearly acting with bias and malice against Cakes. The courts ignored the question of speech.
And frankly the bigger problem, one with most such “Civil Rights” laws is larger than a matter of compelled speech, it is a matter of compelled labor and compelled service through a massively overbroad definition of Public Accommodation – why a bakery should be considered “public accommodation” is beyond me. Moreover, I have argued here on Ricochet before, on several occasions, that civil rights employment and accommodation laws themselves, for whatever good they accomplished 60 years ago, are archaic and violate the far simpler principle that no person or business should ever be able to demand another person or business serve them or cater to their demands – compulsory labor and compulsory service are the bedrock principles here, as they were with Masterpiece Cakes’s assertion that they had a right to refuse a customer’s demand that they did not want because they had a right to refuse to provide a product they normally did not offer anyway – cakes for gay weddings.
And that was the correct principle with Masterpiece Cakes, as it is between AWS and Parler – AWS offered a service (rental of their servers) with certain limitations and conditions, and Parler adamantly refused to abide by those conditions. Moreover, AWS warned Parler months ago that Parler was not meeting those conditions and was subject to cancellation, much as a landlord has a right to throw out a tenant who is either trashing his apartment or, by way of the tenant’s activities in that apartment, infringing on the rights and activities of other better behaved tenants. The “compelled speech” argument simply never enters into it, and is not even a factor, just as it is not a factor when I refuse to do custom work for unreasonable customers.
That Masterpiece Cakes fell back on a “Compelled Speech” claim was because they were trying to argue for a very narrow technical accommodation rather than doing the harder (and doubtlessly more expensive) work of arguing that the CCRC, or federal interpretations of what constitutes “Public Accommodation”, are themselves unconstitutional. They were taking a defensive position of the type frequently advocated by David French, which is to make the Left abide by its rules, rather than challenging the rules. But it was a fundamentally weak principle on which to argue.
And in the end Masterpiece really only won because the CCRC was actively colluding with a madman, and wasn’t abiding by its own rules.
Allegedly