I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I always thought that in the end cooler heads would prevail. But we've now done the experiment in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative to me, to the point where they present a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change.<p>Maybe someone here can talk me down from this new position. But the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me right now.
"In 2010, DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics said that "an interruption of services by Amazon Web Services, on whom we rely to deliver finished genomic data to our customers, would result in our customers not receiving their data on time."<p>Gaming company Zynga warned about how its AWS foundation could quickly vanish when it filed the prospectus for its initial public offering in 2011.<p>"AWS may terminate the agreement without cause by providing 180 days prior written notice, and may terminate the agreement with 30 days prior written notice for cause, including any material default or breach of the agreement by us that we do not cure within the 30-day period," Zynga said.<p>AWS can even terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer immediately under certain circumstances as it did in 2010 with Wikileaks, pointing to violations of AWS' terms of service."<p>Wonder if they can cancel their government contracts so easily.<p>When people debate the merits of "on-prem" versus AWS on HN they rarely focus on the contract terms.
The thing is, you're always going to dependent on <i>someone</i> in the mainstream economic world if you want to have a web presence in North America. Even if you run your own servers, you're at the mercy of your hosting provider, your ISP, your DNS registrar, and even browser level things like Google Safe Browsing. Any of these can be major points of failure.<p>So yeah, not using AWS would avoid being dependent on AWS, but you're going to depend on someone. In this sense, inclusion on the internet ultimately has a political dimension. I think that's just how it is — we live in a society with politics.<p>(I'm omitting commentary on Parler in particular because I have no sympathy for them in this or any other case.)
Playing the devil's advocate here: is this really "exceptional power"?<p>Before the Internet, fringe, extremist political movements had essentially the same options as every other minor interest group: local groups, physical, mailed newsletters, maybe magazines, booths at whatever kind of group meetings, and maybe news media coverage. All of those options still exist. So the modern state of things hasn't <i>removed</i> anything.<p>Since the age of the Internet, cloud providers have the same power as any other hosting provider: Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, whatever; they all have acceptable use policies that will get you taken down if you don't obey them. Outside of those, colocation and network providers seem a bit more willing to tolerate things, but they can still cut you off, just like they (sometimes) did in the good old days. And you can still go full-on backbone peer, if you can afford it, which these political groups certainly can.<p>The bottom line is, you have your old options and you can still host yourself. You have options in between, but if they decide you aren't playing nice, they can hurt you.<p>The only thing "exceptional" here is the nature and vocality of the groups in question.
Is this really new? It certainly feels new, but I don't think it is.<p>There are two issues here.<p>1) You should be very careful about having your business too dependent on a single supplier or partner. You need to have a backup plan in case that relationship goes bad. That is undeniably true, good advice for all startups, and it has always been true.<p>2) The more specific case of Parler? Again it feels new, but I don't think it is. There has never been a time in modern history when if all the leading companies in an industry decided your company was too odious to do business with, you would be able to continue to do business.<p>I'm not saying this is the ideal situation or that we should not discuss how it could be improved, but this is not really anything new.
It also shows the resiliency of the internet. Parler's ability to build their own failsafe network rests on them. I learned a lot of hard lessons with my first failed startup. One of them was not to rely on another platform for my success. If TPB can do it being enemies of nation states. I think Parler will be just fine.
I don’t get all the anti free speech comments here. I rather live in a country with real free speech but no democracy than the reverse. You can’t have democracy without free speech.
I've been on the Internet since before it had pictures. Hosts have always had this power. It's not new. It's not free speech. You pay for a service, you adhere to their rules. You break their rules, you get booted.<p>This argument is a dog whistle defense of terrorism.
If I were running something likely to be deplatformed, I would never consider anything but a multi-cloud solution where no single provider is a single point of failure.<p>It's not that hard to do.
There is now a new risk that needs to be mitigated by the business, that of its business being taken down for any reason at all - subject to the whims of a changing culture, and possibly even outside of the laws of the land one is in.<p>This will hopefully make folks think through the entire supply chain including cloud and SaaS providers.<p>AWS was always like renting an apartment, or even, a fully furnished apartment. At some point, you want your own house and land...<p>I hope that there will be a new impetus to replace the above with colocated servers that are just being managed, and by services that are sold for a period of time, and hosted by the applications themselves.<p>k8s might hopefully be used to build a more resilient infrastructure that can take these systemic shocks.<p>There could be good business for a new class of sub-contractors who would have templates to automate this for their clients.
The concentration of your eggs into one basket is the biggest issue I see here. If your business email, SCM, DNS, CDN, storage, backups, compute, CI/CD, data warehouse/BI, desktop compute... all come from one company (e.g. AWS, MS, or GCP), then you can lose *everything* in a flick of the pen.<p>When you do risk assessments (e.g. SOC 2), you rank all your venders by risk, and answer "what could I do if I lost vendor X?" These are things a business is supposed to do, which is why many intentionally have more than one vendor for the same service, run hybrid cloud, etc when the answer to that question is "close my business."
We're also at the point now where you have to ask <i>which</i> cloud is deplatforming a site. (edit, and their state alignment)<p>Case in point, Russia is now routing Parler traffic.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1351227537985318929?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1351227537985318929?s=...</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20</a> (edit)
I'm not sure exactly where the line should be drawn, but there seems to be a spectrum ranging from "private property" on one side and "utility" on the other. Where property owners can decide what their property is used for, and utilities are "common carriers".<p>In this spectrum, Twitter seems more towards private property, while AWS seems more.like a utility.<p>The law hasn't caught up to addressing the changes of the last decade in this respect, but I think we're about to see it happen, either legislatively or in the courts.
Just make sure you dont use proprietary stuff (e.g Google datastore/firebase etc) and at least you have the chance to go the old fashion way(co-location, smaller hosta etc)
It's no more powerful than a TV channel cancelling a show or a newspaper not running ads anymore.<p>Host your own hardware, it's not that hard. If you care about free speech so much don't go cheap on infrastructure next time.
I would like to see a new class of “social libel” laws - whereby knowing telling lies as truth in a public forum were punishable. Is this a civil or criminal offense?
I helped migrate a major CPG company to AWS. Only, they changed their mind, migrating most of their data to GCP instead, as they saw Amazon as a competitor. Turns out this was an excellent decision.
A portion of your citizens were called to storm your nations capital by a President who refuses to accept the results of a democratic election. The very foundation of your democracy has been eroded. Do not pretend the people who are frightened of these actions are overreacting. Democracy is a fragile thing, and you have a portion of your population who attempted to take a hammer to it.<p>Don't pretend this is a narrative presented by the elite, I don't listen to your news, I don't read the opinions of your celebrities and newscasters, I watched the videos, I saw the discourse. I am not from your nation, and only have what I have seen from the people who were there and the videos they willingly uploaded to the internet, and the unedited footage of the speeches and the words of your president.<p>Your nation is in severe distress.
I don't think so. Sure they'll be down a couple of weeks but most likely back up soon if I were betting money. It shows that "if you build your site to a specific platform" that you might be fucking yourself over. However if you stick to OSS core software you'll be okay. Yeah yeah I know some sites can't afford to be down for a couple weeks but I'm willing to bet vast majority of businesses would be ok. I'm sure parler will be back soon with all the hate and putridness that it always had.
how many businesses are really going to think "Using AWS makes sense for us but we're not going to use AWS because of what happened to parler?"
Oh please. If it weren't tech, then it'd be the ISPs, telcoms, etc. And don't forget the ridiculous platform power of the banking, financial, and payments industry. This would have gone down similarly on bare metal in a colo because... Trump and Co rolled out SESTA and FOSTA, along with several other content provider protections that make content like Parlor a liability for deeper platforms. Don't for a second think that they were kicked off because the companies somehow objected to providing the service. They only object to taking liability for providing services to an unmoderated communication platform.
Parler says they will return by by February. There is too much financial opportunity for large niche ideologies. They will miss the inauguration drama as the deplatformers intended. I wonder what alternative stack Parler will use.
This is not a matter of power of cloud providers. This is cloud providers covering their butts so they don't get charged with a felony.<p><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383" rel="nofollow">https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383</a>
No, it shows the exceptional power of the US Government to impose consequences on people who make it easy for other people to organize a rebellion.<p>What is with these baby logic takes hitting the front page over the last few weeks?
Seeing the people storm the capital and decide that Trump actually won, trying to force him to retain his office sealed the deal for me. I'm now against the second amendment. Not the school shootings, not the movie theaters; I've shot and handled many guns, but seeing this total disconnect from reality shows me that Americans cannot responsibly handle the option to elect somebody, accept the results either way, let alone carry a firearm.<p>The whole notion of it takes just one good gun owner is total garbage. This is the law and order crowd, this is the crowd of "Just one good guy with a gun". Total garbage.<p>Trump lost. Get over it.
ceterum censeo – in extremo, there's a single provider that won't let you down (but maybe messes up).<p>So if you really care about that, you need to host yourself. At least a mirror. Ideally do indieweb.org/POSSE.
I have no doubt in my mind that the violence would have been much worse had Trump won, and while I am happy we bid the bullet, I can’t help wondering how tech and media would have responded.
That is the most depressing part for me - how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. Turns out they don't have to be threatened with overwhelming force. They don't need to be threatened with death, starvation or torture. They don't need to be threatened by economic ruin or untold suffering. No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) and it's time to panic now - and poof, all noble ideals fly out of the window. It doesn't take nukes, it doesn't take Russians or Chinese, it doesn't take death and destruction - it takes Facebook, Twitter and CNN. I am still dumbfounded about how <i>easy</i> it was.
This should give pause to every companies using only the cloud, especially from single cloud company. It is single point of failure and it's under someone else's control.<p>Are they comfortable giving that kind of power to another company? Maybe a competitor?
Wow, why did this fall off the front page? There's no way it wasn't being upvoted sufficiently watching the flurry of initial comments...<p>Was this discussion blocked? And if so, is there a particular policy it violated? This discussion seems extremely important right now.<p>@dang can you elaborate?
Thank God Jeff Bezos is protecting us from these vile terrorists.<p>We need to take down Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The insurrectionists were customers and bafflingly, these companies don't moderate their texts or phone calls whatsoever.
I'm just going to come out and say it. Isn't everyone a bit more nervous about the precedent set by amazon after the parler deplatform. Regardless of how horrible the things were said there, aren't there companies out there kind of wondering if AWS is a risk now?
I call bollocks on this. Everyone whose business goes against the terms of service of the major three cloud providers (in the case of Parler, serving as a platform for calls to violence and sedition, which are <i>criminal offenses</i>) still has the freedom to go to any of the literally <i>hundreds</i> of "bullet-proof hosting" providers, to rent rack space and a fiber uplink somewhere and to place one's own bare metal hardware there.<p>The only thing Parler lost is the convenience that cloud providers offer, but there's no constitutional right to convenience.
Here's how I might open a debate with right-leaning people about freedom of speech.<p>If you sell a product, but make false claims about that product, then you are committing fraud. You have harmed someone (financially) with your speech, and contract laws rightly overrule freedom of speech here. So, if you believe in contract law, which is essential for free markets, then you must believe in limitations on speech... the question then is simply where to draw the line.