To all these people saying "what took Amazon/Google/Apple so long to remove Parler" with screenshots of terrible things being said on there: those terrible things don't even make the top 50% of what I've seen reported to me during my career in ToS enforcement.

Every site out there has that sort of content and much, MUCH worse. You cannot properly imagine it unless you've done the work. You just can't. Network providers know that, and they know every site that accepts user generated content (UGC) will have it.

The difference between those other sites and Parler is that Parler refused to build any mechanism for identifying, reporting, and removing that content, and instead directly told people they'd leave it there. But you can see in the emails Buzzfeed obtained https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws?origin=tuh

...that the issue AWS is removing them for is not the presence of specific content itself, but for being unwilling to effectively identify and remove it. You can also see Amazon has been working with them for weeks to try to get them to address the problem effectively.

We do need to have a conversation about the centralization of network providers on the modern internet, but this isn't a sign of that problem. This is a sign of Parler being unwilling to exert even the smallest amount of effort to weed out the garbage any UGC site collects.

And for the people who are saying that one provider shouldn't be able to shut off a UGC site like this: as someone who owns a site that does deliberately live in the margins of many providers' Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) -- on very different issues --

-- I can say that exchange as detailed in the Buzzfeed article is a model of how network providers *should* act, because they were exceptionally clear about what UGC violates their AUP and what Parler needed to do to handle it, and they gave them plenty of time to address it.

Any site that takes UGC and is ideologically committed to living in the margins of their providers' AUP *needs* to have clear, bright-line internal policies for identifying what is marginal content vs violating content, and they need a system to enforce it.

If you have those two things, chances are much higher that your network provider will look at the framework you've built, see that you make clear bright-line distinctions, and be more willing to keep you as a customer, because they see you're making an effort.

(I say "higher"; it's not guaranteed, and it depends on how risk tolerant the provider is. But without it, you have no chance at all -- as Parler has found out.)

This is not a story about network provider censorship. It's also not a story about a provider acting against one of their hosted clients too late. It's a story about a site who thought they could ignore their network provider AUP without consequences and refused to even try.

If you accept user generated content, and you refuse to build a system to identify and remove the illegal and dangerous content that literally every UGC site collects, you are going to lose your network provider. It's an inevitability. It doesn't matter what that content is.

And seeing the extent to which AWS tried to get Parler to moderate their UGC before removing them should actually make people feel better about how much of the internet runs on AWS. It was (IMO) far beyond what a reasonable service provider needs to do.