AWS is not siding with oppressive regimes, what's with the misleading political slant?
They don't want customers breaking terms of service, whatever those terms are, and especially when it means the rest of their customers are affected. It's not a single company involved here and they're looking out for everyone else they serve.
In this case, enforcing their Terms of Service does constitute siding with oppressive regimes. You could argue that it's not AWS' goal to help oppressive regimes, but in the struggle against censorship, that is the side they have put themselves on in practice. On one side, there are people all over the world who want to communicate freely. On the other, there are authoritarians who want to suppress and surveil that communication. AWS policy used to help the former, and now helps the latter.
I think maybe you're trying to express that under a free market ethical framework, AWS has done nothing wrong here. Which is true, and an insightful indictment of the free market as an inherently liberatory force.
That's not what "siding with" means. AWS is remaining neutral to politics as a company, which is a very good thing. Why do you want multinational corporations to get more involved in geopolitics? Do you think that will somehow lead to a better outcome?
Signal had an strategy, but it involves breaking the terms of service, so that vendor has no reason to comply and put the other customers at risk. Signal just needs to figure out another option. It's a technical issue and nobody is stopping Signal itself. AWS will still host them just fine as long as they follow the terms.
By the way, the free market is what allowed companies like AWS and Signal to exist in the first place, and lets you contributed effort and money if you'd like, so perhaps you should widen your context before throwing around indictments.
Amazon isn’t nesessarily against censorship. They just don’t want to provide this sort of spoofing service. Regardless of whether the spoofers are good or bad.
I believe this is the fundamental issue, from Amazons PoV: this altruistic project with nice goals is abusing a network nuance, but most other actors using this capability are likely to be bad actors.
I don't think Amazons reasoning was "oh, lets help dictators dictate", but more "hey, isn't this a potential security hole ripe for abuse that would make us look incompetent?".
They don't want customers breaking terms of service, whatever those terms are, and especially when it means the rest of their customers are affected. It's not a single company involved here and they're looking out for everyone else they serve.