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Let Amazon know we're boycotting them because of Wikileaks

25 pointsby adriaanbover 14 years ago

14 comments

jasonkesterover 14 years ago
Where do I click to let Amazon know that I'm not boycotting them?<p>I mean really, Amazon is my favorite Big Company right now. They have all sorts of really cool services to make it easy for small businesses to do their thing. And every month or so they send me an email telling me that they just made one of those services <i>cheaper</i>.<p>They also manage to stock every single item of anything that I've needed to buy online in the last several years, and are capable of getting it to me in 2 days without any hassle whatsoever. They do all the creepy user-tracking stuff that every other big company does, but somehow manage to pull it off in a way that is not only not creepy, but actually makes me happy. Hey, Amazon just told me about the new Black Keys album. That's something I might actually consider buying. Thanks Amazon!<p>So yeah, no. I'm not planning to boycott them over some silly internet controversy that they didn't want anything to do with. Pick a better company like PayPal or eBay or Microsoft or Facebook or pretty much <i>anybody</i> and I'm with you. But lay off Amazon. They're cool.
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CPopsover 14 years ago
You're free to boycott Amazon if you wish, but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand. What were they threatened with? More sales taxes? IRS audits?<p>Yes, Amazon's response to this was really weak and cowardly, but let's not lose sight of who is the real villain in this case — Joe Lieberman and whatever other elements of the government are complicit in trying to shut down free speech.<p>I'd rather boycott Washington D.C. than Amazon.
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thangalinover 14 years ago
Dear Amazon.com,<p>WikiLeaks offered the government a chance to review the cables before they went online. They made the offer to ensure that the leaked documents would not jeopardize lives. The government declined. To date, no leaked documents by WikiLeaks have resulted in any harm coming to any individual. While the past cannot be used as a measure of the future, it does support the notion that such releases will likely cause intractable harm in reputation rather than flesh.<p>Although WikiLeaks does not own the content, the scope of the content reveals a problem with the United States: that people in power are more corrupt than could otherwise have been known. If exposing truth and honesty while holding governments and corporations accountable to moral lessons of right and wrong is insufficient cause for Amazon.com to overlook its self-imposed terms of service, then the owners of Amazon.com have taken the moral low-ground. And I shall have nothing to do with them.<p>This a complex issue, with many arguments on both sides, yet one fact remains: WikiLeaks has published Truth. And if Truth stirs trouble, then we, as a society, have failed. We have failed our peers. We have failed our governing. And we have failed our children.<p>And now? I shall tell hundreds of friends.
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gte910hover 14 years ago
I actually think they did hurt themselves here: I now have to say to clients who I'd otherwise push towards their cloud services:<p>"If you get a national politician unhappy with your product, they do have a history of pulling the plug on people, see wikileaks".<p>While that's not a boycott, that is a move from a strong buy to a "consider other options if you have any chance of pissing someone off".<p>I do think Joe Liberman single handedly handed cloud computing to non-american countries though with his stunt. Why base your cloud here when your company gets better data protection in :insert jurisdiction which doesn't give a crap about Joe Liberman's threats:
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Umaluover 14 years ago
Amazon's choice: (1) host Wikileaks and risk getting shut down, or (2) drop Wikileaks, get boycotted. If choice (2) is as bad as choice (1), something I guess the boycotters hope for, then Amazon's choice is a Morton's fork: two equally bad outcomes. Why don't the boycotters stick their Morton's fork where it belongs: into those who wrote and enforce the laws they object to?
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jamboover 14 years ago
HN readers might be interested to know that this site, The Point, is the basis for Groupon.<p><a href="http://www.groupon.com/about" rel="nofollow">http://www.groupon.com/about</a>
boringuserover 14 years ago
Put yourself in Bezos' shoes. If hosting WikiLeaks could potentially make you the victim of DDOS attacks, cause you bad PR, open you to lawsuits, give you trouble with the government, etc, etc, would you really put your company, its employees, everything you have worked for at risk to support this political activism, even if you did believe in it? It's easy enough to say what you think Amazon should do, but if you were the one making the decision it might be more difficult than you imagine.
endlessvoid94over 14 years ago
The holiday season is here. Boycotting amazon isn't going to do a damn thing.<p>The average consumer has no clue that amazon has anything to do with the tech industry. To most people it's just an online store.
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Tichyover 14 years ago
I must admit, while I thought it a pity that Amazon took that step, I think their strong point is selling books and stuff, not politics. I can understand why hosting Wikileaks might have seemed too risky.
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pedalpeteover 14 years ago
Like most hosting services, AWS has rules in there terms about what can be hosted. Agree with wikileaks or not, I think there is little debate that the documents were obtained illegally. Therefore, AWS was right to take them down from a business standpoint.<p>I'll probably get downvoted for saying 'obtained illegally', but I'm talking about the guy who downloaded the docs, not the guy who posted them. I think the worst Wikileaks could be charged with would be purchasing stolen property.
tybrisover 14 years ago
I'm not. If I objected to every company that ever did something morally questionable in the interest of their business I'd be naked, homeless and starve to death.
DjDarkmanover 14 years ago
The moral of this story: if you want to publish something embarrassing to politicians, do it somewhere were they can't abuse their power/influence.
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Silhouetteover 14 years ago
From the site, as I write this (an hour or so after this link was posted and hit the front page of HN):<p>&#62; Amazon should be made aware of the scale of public opposition to what they’ve done.<p>&#62; If we reach at least 1,000 people, then We will each mail Amazon letting them know why we won't be buying from them anymore.<p>&#62; 1%, 989 people to go<p>If that's not irony, I don't know what is.<p>In any case, I don't see the objection here. A lot of Internet warriors seem to be almost zealous in their support of Wikileaks and their belief that the various large-scale releases they have made recently are somehow changing the nature of society and making governments fundamentally more transparent.<p>Wikileaks are quick to say that governments have not identified specific people hurt or killed because of the leaks. However, looking at things from a slightly more neutral point of view, it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect. They have created a lot of hype, disruption and embarrassment, but where's the huge smoking gun? I'm in the UK, and so far there has been commentary on our politicians as with many other places, but there's no evidence that our government ordered a hit on Dr David Kelly, or that Tony Blair had more information than we already knew from the public inquiries about whether Iraq really had WMDs, or that our then-government's support for the US action against a lot of popular opinion was a result of some corrupt deal for personal gain by the politicians calling the shots. Frankly, the leaks have so far been rather anti-climactic.<p>Also, just as an aside, the whole "we offered to let the government help us vet the material" argument is just transparent politics. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of documents. To even <i>try</i> to vet that data in any useful depth, the time needed from security-cleared and fully informed officials, and the amount of taxpayers' money it would cost would be staggering. Please don't tell me Wikileaks weren't well aware of that. And that's without even getting into the "we don't negotiate with enemies" ethics.<p>Given this sort of mess, I don't blame Amazon for not wanting any part of it. The fact that Wikileaks and various embarrassed government officials are having a very public pissing match is not a reason for independent businesses to start taking sides. More pragmatically, given the aforementioned lack of any real substance in the leaks, it is highly likely that the governments are going to win this one, and no business on the scale of Amazon wants to be out of favour with major national governments. There just isn't anything in it for them.
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toover 14 years ago
i would reject everyone and everything of the official sites that go against wikileaks. like the icann will possibly at some point or paypal for cutting of donations or twitter if they ever kill the wikileaks account but amazon is a hoster that was getting ddos'ed. every normal hoster wouldve dropped your page if you harm their business others pay a lot of money for in some cases.