[prestonaustin]

We clearly can't rely on them for 'hotly contested speech' right now. At this moment this is more of a speech tax, as the speech has not yet been contained or suppressed. So you can still host speech you want free on S3 and EC2 as long as you have a plan B if some powerful speech eating weasel comes after you. This matters quite a bit in a practical sense because your pre-crisis approaches can leverage Amazon's low capital startup and recurring costs. Great so long as you don't wed yourself to approaches that only work there.

Of course, if we do all rely on it, it would become an even more obvious point of control and further suppress diversity in hosting as it is already doing in a major way. Diversity of hosts across jurisdictions, with diverse upstream providers is likely to provide surety that free speech will have hosts - but that suffers if we give all the unchallenged biz to Amazon.

I use heroku on EC2 and S3 quite a bit, and advised others to do so until this month. I was curious what they would say about process if someone tried to muscle me out; supposing Lieberman or Biden accept some MPAA inspired line of reasoning on copyright and seek to squash me or my clients to make some lobbyists happy, so I asked them:

http://kommons.com/questions/384