The barrier for making your own “Twitter clone” is low, unless it actually has to scale to Twitter’s perf. The barrier to making a “Twitter clone which has absolutely zero moderation” (which is close to what Parler said) means that you are unlikely to be able to find any vendors in the USA which will accept those contract terms or want to accept the liability.
Analogy: try couch surfing to minimize paying rent. A person with a good reputation and good roommate habits can easily find a place to stay and it will likely be cheap with lots of options for places to stay.
But if that person starts to consume the food that was bought by and marked for others, doesn’t do their part of the chores, starts arguments with roommates and guests, doesn’t pay their rent on time, disrespects the property, violates norms of conduct, then they cause harm to the responsible parties living in that home. Don’t be surprised when they get evicted and their social credibility (like AirBnB ratings) fall off and no one wants to host them. This is remarkably close to what happened when Parler was kicked off of the App Stores and then lost their CDN, DNS, and hosting.
They aren’t acting “in lock step”, they are all equally afraid of the consequences of hosting a high liability client and are looking for a contractual reason to cut their liability.
Have you seen the death threats a Plumber in Texas got because his truck was sold then ended up in ISIS in Syria/Iraq with his company logo on it? Branding and association have real world costs.
It’s also not clear if upstream providers have zero liability if they allow content that is blatantly illegal. I seem to remember that DHS / FBI will just barge into data centers with a warrant and pull servers off the rack with little concern for the other clients that are co-hosted on that physical hardware. The collateral damage of being a client in an unmoderated data center is far more than being in a data center where the moderation rules weed out the riskiest clients.
Analogy: try couch surfing to minimize paying rent. A person with a good reputation and good roommate habits can easily find a place to stay and it will likely be cheap with lots of options for places to stay.
But if that person starts to consume the food that was bought by and marked for others, doesn’t do their part of the chores, starts arguments with roommates and guests, doesn’t pay their rent on time, disrespects the property, violates norms of conduct, then they cause harm to the responsible parties living in that home. Don’t be surprised when they get evicted and their social credibility (like AirBnB ratings) fall off and no one wants to host them. This is remarkably close to what happened when Parler was kicked off of the App Stores and then lost their CDN, DNS, and hosting.
They aren’t acting “in lock step”, they are all equally afraid of the consequences of hosting a high liability client and are looking for a contractual reason to cut their liability.
Have you seen the death threats a Plumber in Texas got because his truck was sold then ended up in ISIS in Syria/Iraq with his company logo on it? Branding and association have real world costs.
It’s also not clear if upstream providers have zero liability if they allow content that is blatantly illegal. I seem to remember that DHS / FBI will just barge into data centers with a warrant and pull servers off the rack with little concern for the other clients that are co-hosted on that physical hardware. The collateral damage of being a client in an unmoderated data center is far more than being in a data center where the moderation rules weed out the riskiest clients.