This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art?
One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using.
AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on the backend (assuming their AWS account didn’t have Parler Inc in the payment details). From there getting taken down from one colo would just be an issue of spinning up a front end at another colo. Front that setup with a couple CDNs and now you have layers where you have to coordinate between half a dozen companies to bring the site down completely, meanwhile your data is safe in AWS because nobody knows your using AWS or even if they do it’s hard to pick you out from the millions of other AWS users.
Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling.
Their failure to make it cloud agnostic being 1 (even though they claimed before they went down that their app could run without AWS without issue).
Their failure to be incapable (still) to get it running again on non-cloud hardware..
And of course their inability to, as you suggest, move the frontend routing to a CDN/Cloudflare/DDosguard type service and have all the heavy lifting continue to be done via AWS/Azure/Google till you can run 100% on your own hardware.
Maybe they didn't think they needed to. Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics. (yea yea, terms of service something or other)
> Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics.
AWS dropped WikiLeaks as a customer back in 2010 for political reasons, and apparently this was announced by a US senator even before AWS did so themselves:
Cloudflare and Daily Stormer is another good example. The mistake there was the implication that Cloudflare was endorsing the stormer rather then being a neutral carrier and Cloudflare shut down that idea quickly. I have to applaud them, it’s hard to be neutral in the US, everything is “with us or against us.” People watch too many gangster movies I think.
Not that my company will produce anything as controversial as Parler but I now use this example to explain why we go the extra mile with things (e.g. scrubbing headers). Sometimes the worst-case scenario really does come true.
> Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling.
Parler's case has zero to do with incompetence, and it boggles the mind of how suddenly putting together web apps with bare metal servers is somehow depicted as normal or usual or basic competency skills. It isn't. At all.
The majority of the world's web apps are hosted by one of the four major cloud providers. AWS alone hosts about 1/3 of the world's websites. The only reason anyone ever had to move away from AWS ever was due to their high prices, and even then the decision was always to move to another major player.
Hell, whenever I point out that there are bare ones cloud service providers which are far cheaper.than AWS, such as Hetzner, I'm faced with at best an industrial dose of skepticism.
Let's face it: up until now there wasn't any reason at all to even consider hosting your startup app on a non-major cloud provider. At all. In fact, it's tremendously hard to argue using anything beyond them. You need scale on-demand, high-availability, and reliability. You do not get any of that by even picking most of the non-major cloud providers, let alone running bare metal servers.
Post-facto accusations of incompetence are not justifiable, specially when criticising the undisputed go-to rule that driver over half of the world's websites.
AWS publishes which IPs it owns, so scrubbing headers is not enough for secrecy. (Not that doing something that relies on secrecy is a smart plan for a business, anyway.) https://isitonaws.com/
Using your own ips works against you anyway - it’s easy for someone to backlist your ip range to keep people from seeing content that they don’t agree with. However blacklisting all of AWS, GCP, or Cloudflare breaks so many things that nobody does it - and that would be the same for any large CDN. DNS is still an issue but increasingly less so since all the work being done to bypass censorship by authoritarian regimes (aka keeping people from blocking internet ads) works just as well for controversial content.
This is a gross oversimplification of what AWS is. For starters, no one pays for AWS for the APIs. People do pay AWS for the on-demand infrastructure, and the global network of datacenters, which makes it trivial to setup a highly-availiable web application distributed globally. AWS allows you to put your highly-availablr global application together by click-click-clicking on dashboards, run AWS-specific infrastructure-as-code scripts, or run third-party scripts like Pulumi. In the process, APIs don't play any role in the decision process.
Actually my assessment it is spot on. AWS is just a bunch of APIs, you don’t need to be inside a VPC to use them, you can call them from anywhere. If you wanted to hide your usage of AWS you could stick a varnish server in Digital Ocean or any other cloud or colo provider and have it make signed requests to your S3 bucket, or lambda, or a traditional load balancer fronting http servers. People might know or suspect you were using AWS but if they can’t tie you to specific account then it’s hard to get you shut down. It’s always possible that someone could bribe someone at your CDN or colo to lookup origin ips but even then you could plan for that and put your data stores in a separate account so that even if your http server account is shut down, you can spin up another AWS account for the http servers and your back in business.
From a technical standpoint I think half the fun of working for Parler would have been evading the left’s efforts to take them down. I don’t know who they hired for technology but they lacked spirit in addition to fundamentals! ;)
"I'm eager to give big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter a run for their money."
Hosting servers isn't the hard part, and it isnt the same as running a social media platform. This blog is riddled with neivete and a misuse of the word "fear" to get clicks. Don't even get me started on trying to use the "they didn't come for me" quote when relating to online posts. Government != Private companies
If you want to compete you will require moderation, period. Illigal and disturbing content will have to be removed and sectioned off from your users. Or do really you want the average user seeing a trending video of gore and targeted harassment of people? Even 4chan moderates.
You will have to serve hundreds of petabytes of image and video data - you will have to use cloudflare or some other cache mechanism like everybody else. Cloudflare was the reason 4chan was kept alive btw.
You need lawyers on retainer that understand law pertaining to your business. If not then you're left open to civil liabilities anyone can exploit.
You need money. You will require algorithms for promotion of content which requires user tracking which requires databases that contains peoples habitual information.
You've now created facebook and twitter or you're running on investor money. Eventually you will have to sell out your users.
People forget that the "big social media" all came from the same small places when it was a lot harder to do ( do you know how much more expensive bandwidth used to be?). The difference is they got popular and smelled the money. It takes a very special community to not do the same.
I worked at a startup that managed its own bare metal. It was very hard and time consuming. And when things went down it was on you. You needed a really good datacenter partner to make sure that they were on top of things and could drop things at a moment's notice. But you don't know how responsive they will be until you're actually experiencing an outage.
The level of convenience that cloud providers give is just orders of magnitude more efficient and easier.
I have worked for companies in the past with horrible datacenter partners (one of them did not know that one of the two switches they routed our traffic through was completely dead), so I definitely agree with you on that.
On the flip side, I wonder how much better the support from a cloud provider is if it's an isolated problem and not something that's setting twitter aflame.
If it takes a cloud provider in the order of hours to get me back online, I could probably get the same sort of service from one of the better colos/hosting providers, especially if they were local and I had the ability to make a call to get support.
There are other conveniences to cloud providers of course, but I think I if I could find highly skilled ops people and pay them well, I would run my own servers every time. For the kind of games I've worked on, the money/CPU cost of cloud is ludicrous.
The trick these days is even finding high-level ops people who aren't already working 3-400k jobs for AWS/Azure/GCP
> On the flip side, I wonder how much better the support from a cloud provider is if it's an isolated problem and not something that's setting twitter aflame.
I’ve had 4w to resolution for major service degradation on a big name provider and ~2d for full site outage (highest support tier)
You said it yourself - aws, goog, msft have very good sres but they’re not your sres. Meaning they dont care if you have a big event/demo/deal close coming up before they start doing network gear upgrade and such...
You make me feel so underpaid, is 300k the going rate for being a DevOps Engineer that knows the old ways of CGI/LAMP and can leverage running Exchange/IIS nowadays?
I don't even know if these salaries are truthful now.
I don't actually know if that's the going rate TBH. That was the range our ops (not devops, he managed our datacenter ops) guy was hired away for almost a decade ago
An enterprise client of a cloud vendor will have dedicated account technicians - response time is extremely fast (minutes or hours). Perhaps things have improved compared to some of the other comments here.
The other consideration is that things generally don't just 'go down' like they do with bare metal (because HA - replication and so on), but if they do, it's likely affecting a large portion of the internet too.
It surprised me how well cloud providers have managed to sell "availability" and lack of responsibly for site downtime, and how much of a premium they can charge for it. Most people don't need 5 9's (not that any cloud actually provides that level of reliability) or infinite scalability, just a box that's good enough in both dimensions.
I switched my personal website to a Raspberry Pi 4 in my basement a while ago, with cloudflare caching and roll-your-own DDNS - I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy the whole thing was to do (although my requirements are far from exotic).
Not the poster but I assume an easy setup is simply ubuntu server, nginx, get a domain and put it on cloudflare free plan, setup a script that updates your home IP to cloudflare dns records.
Then do letsencrypt for the https cert, setup automatic renewal, and you're probably good.
I wonder how much of this is just the industry maturing/specialising. We don't think it's weird that most people don't mill their own flour when they bake bread, so long as the quality of the flour is good enough we're happy for someone else to do it for us.
In the same way most people/companies don't really need to care what hardware their application runs on, only that it meets some bar of quality/cost that's appropriate for them. If someone else is delivering this then you've removed a small department's worth of overhead/planning from your corporate structure.
If you need to have your baked goods constaltly, you will be better prepared with many flour providers in case of that one provider does NOT LIKE YOUR RECIPE and stop selling the ingredients to you... Or get your own flour mill.
Pissing off your supplier is something everyone has to be careful of. If you're drawing little swastikas on your cakes while telling everyone how great "Phil's flour" is then don't be surprised when Phil doesn't want to associate himself with you any longer.
The sibling comment pointed out that vendor lock in can be a problem which I agree with, but I think for most of the industry that's a problem of protecting yourself from predatory price hikes/services being deprecated rather than the problem of actively pissing off people you need.
The difference is that flour has been completely commoditized, while cloud hosting has only recently started becoming commoditized and isn't all the way there yet.
I think your underlying point is fair, but I'd like to see you post a more constructive explanation of where it would be useful for the analogy to capture a truth about cloud services that is not true for, say, flour - switching cloud providers is incredibly difficult due to vendor lock-in.
Yeah... and the crazy thing is that people on the big clouds or even just using Firebase have experienced outages as a result.
I've had zero downtime due to running on a Digital Ocean VPS the past few years and very, very brief outages due to my own decisions around various upgrade and backup decisions. I spend less, I get full control and there's zero risk of a surprise bill.
I think the key thing is that most customers won't blame you if your service goes down due to an AWS outage.
Them having margins in no way means it's a waste of money. That's not how things work. It would cost just companies so much more money for the devops team needed to achieve parity with the services they provide.
Do you look at a car manufacturer, see that they're making a profit, and assume "I could clearly build a comparable car for less money?"
Them having gigantic margins (e.g. 4x or more on network egress) can mean that any one use case might be better satisfied with something slightly more custom, especially if we stop pretending that administering an AWS account is free and that the overlap between what we need and what AWS offers is perfect.
On both sides of this, the thing to do is to critically examine your needs and decide if one or another solution fits. AWS can be a game changer for some companies and an immensely complicated money sink that never gets good enough performance for others.
I can’t help but find the introductory quote a bit much, given that Parler’s moderation scheme (judgement by other Parler users) typically resulted in the removal of all opinions other than those held by the majority of Parler users.
In any case, Parler’s problem (well, one problem of many) was that they had MASSIVE hardware requirements that dramatically cut down on the number of places that could practically host them.
It also seems that despite assurances and good sense, Parler had deeply tied itself to Amazon’s APIs, making migration off AWS slow even once a host was found.
My initial thought was it can’t be that hard to migrate off quickly. Then I thought about all the major sites I’ve worked on or built over the past decade.
Oh crap. There is zero chance I could do it quickly.
So a turn around from 20 years ago when I would setup LAMP applications on new new hardware in an afternoon.
> Most datacenters only lease by the rack. These racks can hold up to 42 servers and are far too expensive.
Hurricane Electric will happily lease you an entire rack for $400/mo with a 1Gbps connection. I would argue that, in comparison to the prices the OP mentions, Hurricane Electric's price is quite good. Also, there is one fewer middleman between you and the Internet (and power, and rack space, etc, and the front door, etc).
(I believe that $400 number does not include vast amounts of power, so the actual price tag for filling that rack with conventional hardware may be rather higher. On the other hand, depending on your use case, fitting in a small power budget may be straightforward.)
I’m not sure running their own hardware and relying on an ISP or colocationg at a datacentre would help Parler compared with renting services/VMs from someone like Amazon.
Just about all ISP have terms and conditions that prohibit use that they find offensive.
Data Foundry, mentioned in the article, acceptable use policy is below and I’m sure could be used to kick out Parler
Ultimately you can't hide IP addresses - an app or website will be making requests to or served from an IP address, which is physically traceable to the IP/data center.
Then either a subpoena or publicity against the ISP will force them to do disclose who the customer is and/or remove them.
As for the subpoena, you can make it harder to find you by spreading your addresses across multiple jurisdictions. Put the company that owns the IP in one country and make it rent them to another company in a different country who owns the servers and the website and rents the domain name from a third company in yet another jurisdiction.
Eventually they'll find you (there aren't many ways to escape a government forever), but this game can buy you enough time to move someplace where extradition is unlikely.
How? It would take one minute for a dude with some sniffer on his wifi to find the DNS entries and CDN used. Go to the press with "Parler is being hosted out of domain Foo w/ CDNfront" and viola.
Does there exist a de-platform proof way of hosting something on the internet?
Even if you host your own server on your own premises they could forbid you from using the location, shut off your electricity, etc.
Is it possible to host a website entirely on bittorrent? I suppose there's also IPFS but I'm not entirely familiar.
Maybe once solar is cheap enough you could launch some sort of array of powered drones into the sky that follow the sun that send files to people via P2P - solar mesh network if you will.
"They" in that case would typically be the government (assuming you own your property), which at least in the US would have to (at least nominally) follow more regulations and protocols for restricting your speech, while a private business doesn't really have those same obligations.
I'm not sure how ISPs fit into this though, and to what extent they can say "we don't like the content you're serving" and cut your net. Obviously if the content is outright illegal that's one thing, but I wonder if they can "pull an Amazon".
Probably not. In many places, shutting off utilities to an occupied residence is very hard to do legally without meeting a huge number of requirements.
I once lived in an apartment tower that didn’t pay the water bill for 3 years (because of an incompetent transfer of management responsibilities). They didn’t shut off the water. They didn’t threaten to shut off the water. After 3 years, they threatened to charge interest on the unpaid amount if it wasn’t paid within 30 days!
Tor is secure, but not absolutely anonymous. If the entry relay and exit node are controlled by the same party then they know where you came from and where you're going.
Given anyone can do such nodes and it's relatively inexpensive to get gigabit lines nowadays - it's no doubt a good number of the nodes are owned by various three letter agencies.
Bandwidth isn't expensive on taxpayer dollars, but it is expensive for individuals.
Also because a lot of relays go outside the U.S. the metadata can be collected and stored at will.
To Downvoters: So the above statement is somehow 'false' and 4chan and Gab are NOT self-hosting and are in the same situation like Parler which is still down?
Does anyone have concrete evidence that contradicts the parent AND the grandparent statements? Or is it just the emotional reaction to two websites that one just felt the need to downvote a fact without reason or counter evidence?
Let's not get any form of irrationalities in the way of the actual facts and the truth.
I think people are responding to language like “wannabe-stasi deplatform mob” and “de-platforming witch hunt” more than the actual facts or websites involved.
That language is not neutral, so the response isn’t surprising.
Running on a shoestring budget is not very interesting. What would be interesting is running a well funded production level data center in a completely hostile political environment with every other commercial entity trying to refuse business with you.
Nice post and inspiring, but one small point bother me: "I feel GREAT not living in FEAR". Well, you just traded the fear of being shut down by big corpo for the fear of having your hard disk or memory or fan or whatever fail.
Most rackmount servers double up on everything like power-supplies. Harddrives should be on RAID so a single drive failure shouldn't be a problem and you would have some time to goto the colo and switch out the hard drive.
CPU and RAM last a very long time so it shouldn't be a problem (I've had literally 1 RAM stick failure in over a decade of hosting and the datacenter swapped out the bad memory stick in less than 30 minutes -- it also didn't bring down the server either, the kernel log started showing a bunch of ECC issues and a quick memory check pointed to the stick that had the problem).
And of course you can just get double or triple the amount of servers with IP failover and such to be even more resilient to hardware failures.
This article is just showing how to get started. Throw more servers at it for more redundancy and scaling as needed.
The photos though.. If you are reading this remove the server or the rug/carpet!!!! All the fluff from the carpet and the dust from the floor invading your box and will be chocking the fans!!!
Thanks to TLS, Netflix and Fast are indistinguishable. All your ISP knows is the IP address you’re talking to. They’d only know that you visited Fast in particular if you were using your ISP’s DNS, which you shouldn’t be using anyways :)
It's indistinguishable from an protocol perspective, not a data analysis perspective. Or to put it more practically, if a large data stream from Netflix lasts more than 10 seconds, it's video.
Makes sense, networking was never my strong point. To be fair, alot of people will be using their ISP's DNS, but at least this is avoidable, even if you have to specifically take steps.
My rinky-dink little ISP has peering connections with Netflix, Apple and AWS. The operate in 2 midwestern cities with maybe 50,000 total customers, so it seems like the Netflix vs ISP issue only exists with the Comcasts and Xfinities of the world. Everyone else is really happy to work with Netflix; it costs them nearly nothing.
"The pirate bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost 2 decades. Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing.
The most ironic thing is that TPBs enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one. Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too.
First time tpb got shut down was because a Mexican gang wanted some cash. Took a day to move. Second time was when the USG forced Sweden to send 50 cops and even arrest the lawyer. Took 3 days to get back online, 1.5 days was spent to get drunk and party."
This made me realize that one reason many of us use cloud hosting is that our home internet is lacking, whether through caps or the lack of fiber deployment. It was easy for Congress to railroad the rights of private property owners and cities for 5G but they can’t seem to do it for fiber... Maybe this can get Conservatives to realize that unfettered broadband access lessens the power of the hosts.
The physical network itself evolved away from peer -> peer back to client -> server. With IPv6 I'd hoped we would today be living in a world where I could send my friend the url fe80::1ff:fe23:4567:890a/cat.mov and they could download a video directly from my phone. No matter where my phone happens to be in the world. People could host "micro services" on their personal devices and the whole world could access them. If someone wants to know if I'm free on a date they could connect to my phone's calendar app directly and ask. There are so may possibilities of truly peer to peer applications.
But the network itself prevents this. Bittorrent has to jump though multiple NAT busting hoops to allow two internet users to talk to each other directly. limited IPv4 addresses mean home internet connections have dynamic IP addresses which means no one can realistically host at home. Because no one hosts at home they consume far more than they upload. Because of this the physical network was built with a much higher download bandwidth than upload. It's a vicious cycle that wasn't intentional it just sort of evolved that way.
This so much. People don’t realize how much ubiquitous NAT has eroded individuals’ online capabilities and freedoms and shifted the internet from what it was meant to be (much more bidirectional than it is now)
I shudder when tech folks themselves insist on NAT as a core security tenet - sure it might be a convenient extra layer but it’s so sad what’s been sacrificed in its name
I doubt running your own server is always the right solution.There are pros and cons for and against hosting yourself. A small company without dedicated security team may get hacked and all customer data exposed, for example.
Contrary to what this article insinuates, the vast majority of companies do not have to worry about violating the terms of services of cloud providers and other external services, because they don't offer services designed to violate besaid terms of services.
As for Parler, of course they should have seen that coming. It's pathetic that they didn't. They should have looked at sites like the Piratebay for how to do it and prepared a bit more.
A personal anecdote why some blog poster is scared and worried about ToS of cloud providers? Sure, go ahead and host your website in your mom's basement. That's exactly my point, a company who has reason to believe they will violate the ToS of business partners should not make business with those business partners. It's kind of trivial.
That's why Parler was such an epic fail, not because they didn't host everything themselves. They were acting as if they'd care about free speech - unless it wasn't totally compatible with their personal views, in case of which they'd ban instantly - and did not prepare in the slightest for contingencies and were caught in the cold. All of that in the light of plenty of precedents, ranging from Napster over Piratebay to ISIS propaganda websites. It baffles my mind how a company could be so unprepared.
The "reason" given why Parler failed is awfully glib and one dimensional. You can't just serve content to millions of people per day and think you can just up and move to another provider.
Had Parler just moderated their posts like they were asked to do, they would still be around. You can still have right wing, even extreme right wing views without calling for violence or organizing insurrections. The fact they essentially refused to moderate and let calls for violence fester on their platform is why they were shut off.
That and their hardware footprint seemed ridiculously overprovisioned. You can serve content to millions of people per day with fewer boxes than they were using.
I always try to design a "degraded mode" read-only into my apps that covers maintenance windows and unscheduled outages. That is usually easier to lift and shift than the full app and can even be hosted someplace else if you don't mind it lagging behind the live website.
One can only assume that 90% of their hardware was doing something much heavier than “microblogging”. I’m guessing e.g tons and tons of media processing like video transcoding.
Would be interesting to hear how much it costs Twitter to have video features. If I was Parler right now I’d just switch off media and throw up a very lean MVP version with just text. Even with millions of users Parler has the luxury of almost no consistency problems at all. It’s all eventual consistency and simple replication. Shouldn’t need a lot of hardware at all.
I'm picking up a weird sentiment from these articles about parler.
Something like... shoving someone so they fall and break their teeth, and then trying to blame them and saying, "it's your own fault for having such poor balance". A coping strategy for guilt? I just meant to harm you a little bit?
I think your analogy breaks because it represents the people "shoving" Parler and the people talking about this afterwards as one, which is not the case.
A better analogy would be: Parler likes to hang out with the school bully, even though everyone told them not to. One day, the bully shoved Parker and it broke it's teeth. Should the bully's conduct have been allowed? Almost certainly not, and that's a problem. But at the same time Parler was warned about the bully and yet they disregarded all warnings, believing that it wouldn't happen to them.
Parler can make a stand, saying "it is the school's job to keep bullies under control" (which is true) and live it's life as if there were no bullies because that's what life should be. Some people do precisely that for worthy causes, knowing full well what the consequences are (see: Rosa Parks). Or they can do what most of us did in school and stay away from the bully. Less principled? Sure. But our dentist bills are a lot cheaper as a result.
I don't think people are defending Amazon's side. Instead they are (somewhat reluctantly) admiting that what Amazon did is legal, which is not the same.
this is all good except when people in a different country try access your service, they start to complain about your service being slow due to massive latency and lagging.
and then you wished you would have went to the cloud after all.
I really struggle to understand how some folks didn’t realize they were using other people’s things until recently. Maybe the fact that they weren’t physically in a space was hiding the proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen or so times as you travel to twitter.com.
It is free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom minded individuals seem to think freedom only goes in one direction. I will defend DJTs right to tweet stupid shit all day and every day, just as I’ll defend Twitter’s right to kick him off the platform.
It also seems to miss the point that you will always use something owned by someone else as long as you exist in a connected world. It's also why the problem exists: being together also means having to deal with conflicting directions and since you don't "own" everything your direction might not "win".
The same goes for getting deplatformed: if you are being nasty the problem isn't the non-governmental org removing you, that's a symptom of nobody wanting to deal with you. (or nobody 'big and easy')
Just because it looked good, or looked like a lot of people were 'with' you, doesn't mean it's true and doesn't mean it keeps looking that way if the barrier to entry gets higher. Hanging around in a browser and 'liking' or otherwise interacting/spreading things isn't actually a replacement for "a group of likeminded people sharing ideals", it's much more comparable to schoolkids forming groups.
At some point we might see a digital platform that is expensive enough and has a higher entry complexity to actually only grow and maintain people that are 'true' to the ideals fostered by that platform. Only then do we have an example that would be 'real' enough to converse about.
Is it freedom of speech to cut off your power supply and running water if I don't like your face? What about mobile connectivity and internet? Can we refuse to sell you groceries?
Can you live without 'using other people's stuff' except like a hermit in a cave?
If it’s a government service (like power and water in many cases), that’s why freedom of speech as a right exists - to protect you from government retaliation for speech. For mobile connectivity and internet, similar rules apply if the service is a common carrier which recognizes the fact that while private, these organizations operate as government-allowed monopolies.
For groceries, that’s a private business. If you run into a grocery store and cause a scene or do something the owner doesn’t like the owner can remove you. There are fairly narrow exceptions to this, such as how you can’t usually be discriminated against for being a member of a protected class.
Freedom of Speech in the US was never designed to protect you from other people, it was designed to protect you from the government.
I think we both have an understanding that a person should not be left without essential services or be punished without some kind of due process.
If so, the government centric line of argument does not get you anywhere, because there are many essential services are not government owned or controlled monopolies..
My electric, water, internet and mobile suppliers are private Same goes for the bank. There are only a handful of companies in each category in the country, and they could wake up tomorrow and remove me from their network.
You can either have personal liberty, or oligopolies with contracts 'we can remove you at any time for any reason'. Not both.
Power supply and water are utilities. Mobile connectivity and internet are not. Groceries are not.
Someone else's speech isn't a protected class, except for speech due to religion. Discrimination based on things that aren't a property of being in a protected class is legal for any non-utility.
Personally I'd say that internet service providers should be utilities and regulated as such, but currently they aren't so the ISPs are allowed to decide what speech to carry.
Authenticity plays a huge role here. Why do we let shit by the metric ton over the firewall attack free liberties and social discourse online? China literally has payed 3 million + people for years to do this, that's two agents for every social group in the free world.
Most of the bullshit our western democracies have experienced in the last years online should be archived and studied for the crimes our Russian Chinese friends have committed against our free democracy.
I don't like how it's fashionable to point finger at China/Russia for every possible issue.
We literally have registered political parties in the west that do the exact same thing and the matter was proven in a court of law (Leave EU). They have faced no material consequences.
You can’t live in a society without using other people’s stuff (practically, I’m sure we could come up with examples of ownership concepts being challenged).
But living in a society means not upsetting people so badly that they won’t sell you groceries. There’s tons of ways to do that while retaining your ability to speak what’s on your mind, you just have to be thoughtful about how your words effect others, even if just to make sure you don’t get kicked out of society.
That argument works if by "upsetting people" we mean actual real people with normal psychology.
But it falls apart when 'people' are multinationals and "upsetting them" means their PR department gets a funny idea. In that case we need a contract that provides more protection than 'we can remove you at any time for any reason'
The whole, “they’re faceless greed machines” works both ways, though, doesn’t it? You’ve got to do something pretty universally terrible to have a blood sucking corporation actually turn down your money...
And yet I’m neither of those things and I’ve never been kicked off of a platform, so clearly there’s something off with what you’ve said, otherwise people would be getting deplatformed for saying or doing anything at all that might go against popular sentiment.
Parler wasn’t removed from AWS because it was a conservative site, it was removed because it wasn’t willing to handle the legally troubling volume of potentially criminal activity. You can post your thoughts on any conservative idea you want on Twitter, no one is getting banned for that. The only reason anyone has been removed from any popular social media (or AWS) is because they became unwilling to recognize the fact they owe more than nothing to their fellow man, which includes not trying to silence others through intimidation.
Ideas have not been and are not still the problem, is the refusal to think carefully about how to express oneself.
"never been kicked off of a platform, so clearly there’s something off with what you’ve said"
I've never gotten COVID, so clearly there is something wrong with how you breathe!
Do some reading, google employees got banned from gmail and never found out why.
There is an important point that you are missing - I am not claiming that you can't kick people off your platform. I am asking that you have fair due process, and it's the same rules for me and for some loudmouth politician.
Depends on where you live and what the law says. I believe some Americans would answer 'yes' to all of those. A transaction between private individuals (or non-governmental organisations) is a privilege, not a right.
In other parts of the world there would be limits and requirements set by the parties elected by the people, i.e. rules on what things you can and can't discriminate on (like ability to pay you can measure, but skin color is not allowed to be a factor for selling electricity). Generally there is a list of factors that you cannot use to allow/deny sale.
In the US, people can refuse to sell you groceries, and for many people that's pretty impactful. Presumably Amazon also bans people for abuse, but life without Amazon sounds like a huge loss of access.
Under the US Constitution, Christians can also refuse to bake gay cakes, fire gay employees, or evict gay members from positions of leadership.
At the heart of cancellation is the freedom of association; perhaps we should redraw the boundaries on where that freedom begins and ends, but while keeping in mind the balance of affairs.
None of those are freedom of speech, because none involve speech acts, or refusal to engage in speech acts.
They are freedom of association, but in some cases—in US law for the first consideration—they are within the scope of such freedom that government can (under the strict scrutiny test) and has chosen to (e.g., either as part of regulation of monopolies or as part of public accommodation law) limit.
Fair point. But I get my electricity, telephone service, water, gas, groceries for entities owned by someone else and I don't have to worry about having any of these services pulled because of what I posted on twitter yesterday. Imagine the phone company telling you that you will no longer recieve service because of something you said on a call.
Some people's livelyhood depend on their google or facebook accounts every bit as much as they depend on telephone service.
The argument isn't against individuals, or even corporations, having the freedom to deny service. The argument is about monopolies, or in the case of Parler: colluding monopolies, being able to do so.
There are two things everyone knows are market failures that need to be regulated: monopolies and third party negative externalities. Right and left wing economists alike. Trust bust and regulate monopolies, and return net neutrality.
Why allowing (socially as in bad PR) any censorship is bad.
Otherwise you get where we are at. What the mainstream deems bad is silenced. What transient outrage seems bad is silenced. What authorities convince the masses is scary gets silenced. Any voice that platform doesn't like and isnt popular enogh gets silenced.
One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using.
AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on the backend (assuming their AWS account didn’t have Parler Inc in the payment details). From there getting taken down from one colo would just be an issue of spinning up a front end at another colo. Front that setup with a couple CDNs and now you have layers where you have to coordinate between half a dozen companies to bring the site down completely, meanwhile your data is safe in AWS because nobody knows your using AWS or even if they do it’s hard to pick you out from the millions of other AWS users.