Parler is offline. Their CEO says they’ll be back by weeks end. It’s more likely that Pence will come to the inauguration in his boxers. Data migration is a long process & no two cloud services are built the same. On-prem won’t happen in a week either. It’ll be months at best.

That is just how technology works. Different companies means different development standards. What they had on AWS will not be compatible with another cloud provider if they can get one. It’ll have to be reverse engineered & rewritten. That’s hundreds of development hours.

In the mean time the authorities should now be looking at Gab. A quick pop on this morning has their CEO announcing the new traffic numbers (about 600K). From an IT standpoint they have done very well at scaling to meet the demand of all those new users. That is not an easy task.

They have several groups within Gab and as of right now, their “Stop the Steal” group only has 100K members. This might give authorities a better idea of how many of the 74mil Americans actually really support the President to the grave.

Gab’s own ToU does say that it will remove content not protected by the 1st Amendment, including credible threats of violence & promotion of terrorism, among other things. We will see what they do about the potential flood of violent alt-rightists they get.

Not acting on their ToU could result in their internet provider revoking service at any time, for any reason. I read their ISP’s ToU (easy info to find). They express that they can deny access to the internet as they wish, especially if there is potential illegal activity.

Several other services such as Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Google, PayPal & Stripe Inc have revoked services in the past to Gab. This is likely why they boast their own infrastructure now (built on Mastodon). A good idea, but still doesn’t side step the ISP.

Interesting to note is that these major virtual world players have been denying access to their services due to hate speech & promotion of violence since 2016. It just never hit mainstream media that it was happening because at the time, Gab was very small.

They still have a revenue of less that $10mil a year, but I suspect a major cash injection soon by... interested parties. Especially if Parler is offline for an extended period. Something to keep an eye on.

Services taking action against violence and hate isn’t a new concept. Which is where I will be critical of the big SM platforms. If Visa was willing to deny payments, what really stopped Facebook & Twitter from removing access to their services for violations?

It really isn’t a good look that Gab’s Wiki page lists them as apart of an anti-Semitism series. The network was used by the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter regularly. Individuals affiliated with Australia’s Neo-Nazis, Britain’s UKIP party & Breitbret affiliates are also users.

All these being said, we now need proper regulation of our tech companies. There is a rise now in a call for “alt-tech”. These would be essentially copies of services we know today that WILL allow hate speech & threats of violence on their platforms.

Imagine an ISP that allows people to plan violence together on it. I’m not saying it couldn’t get shut down, but unless there is a law in place, it would be very difficult. This isn’t just the USA that has to pass laws regarding this.

Anyways, IT rant of the year over. And it’s only the second Monday of the year... Feel free to yell at me if you think I got something wrong. The IT world isn’t simple & even a pro can miss details or get them wrong.