Right, so first off, fuck Parler and the fascist assholes behind it. Glad we got that out of the way. Now, here’s why this is a terrible precedent for the web: AWS isn’t Facebook or Google but a web host. https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1348109301781557250

Facebook, Twitter, and Google are privately-owned specialised apps with algorithmic timelines and curation that make money by gaining insight into people and their communication and exploiting it for profit. We call this people farming/surveillance capitalism.

Amazon Web Services offers web hosting. This is a utility. Unlike Facebook or Twitter’s services it actually deserves to be covered under a (US) Section 230-style law. What’s worrying here is that Amazon did not receive a legal request to take down Parler, they just decided to.

Why is this a dangerous precedent? Because unlike the Facebook and Twitter decisions this affects freedom of access to the World Wide Web in general. This affects potential future decentralised systems as well. So Parler today, your socialist web site Bezos hates tomorrow…

Of course the glaring problem here is how big Amazon Web Services and AWS are today and how much power they have. Also Section 230-style rights for utilities should also carry utility-style obligations. Your heating company can’t just cut you off because it doesn’t like you.

But perhaps most importantly, it shows the dangers of centralisation. So what can we do about it? Use and support smaller web hosts that run their own infrastructure.

Access to the Web (again, which is not what Facebook, etc., provide but which AWS does) should be a utility that’s open to all. If AWS receives a legal takedown notice they must comply/challenge it as per the law. However this sort of denial of service sets a dangerous precedent.

Fuck Parler, sure. But let’s make sure we don’t fuck ourselves and the potential for a decentralised, open web in the future.

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