[gfodor]

There are two things that can be true at the same time:

- Amazon was within its legal and ethical rights to do this, and ought to win any court cases, etc.

- The aggregate situation of de-platforming of individuals and entire platforms from the Internet by a few unilateral decisions by corporations reveals a power structure we ought to not want (it has always been there, but now it's undeniably shown itself willing and able to exercise its power when needed) since it will inevitably be abused given incentives and the lack of checks and balances on it.

[JamesBarney]

> - The aggregate situation of de-platforming of individuals and entire platforms from the Internet by a few unilateral decisions by corporations reveals a power structure we ought to not want (it has always been there, but now it's undeniably shown itself willing and able to exercise its power when needed) since it will inevitably be abused given incentives and the lack of checks and balances on it.

When it's more than five separate organizations that all independently decide to deplatform is it still a unilateral decision? I also doubt these decisions were made unilaterally in the companies themselves.

In this specific circumstance do we need to regulate these businesses to keep them from removing content related to organizing a violent insurrection?

No one even removed this content until these groups literally stormed the capital chanting about hanging members of congress. I don't see the problem.

[gfodor]

I'll admit the use of 'unilateral' here is probably poor, I don't know the proper one. These companies exert monopoly power in the markets they are in. Decisions made by companies which are monopolies are "unilateral-ist" because once a small number of them make a decision together (perhaps colluding) then it leaves no recourse for the person or group they are deciding against.

Mentioned elsewhere, the process we should all wants is one where if a company wants to nuke an entire speech platform like this due to illegal speech, they can get a judge to affirm the legality of the content and the negligence of those who are hosting it. With that in hand, their actions would be immune from criticism. Without it, we find ourselves here, where we basically have to trust them to make the right decision and not abuse their power. It's not what we should want, for the same reason that we should have wanted anti-trust laws in place to reduce the power of monopolists, despite the fact that monopolists were operating entirely legally and often ethically.

[JamesBarney]

Banning content moderation unless you have a judge's order seems like it could be problematic. If this law existed could dang still ban people for people for being a-holes and not following site guidelines or would he need a court order?

[gfodor]

I'm referring specifically to the situation where an entire service is going to be shut down, and silence many, many people who presumably were not doing anything illegal.

At the risk of a stupid analogy, AWS have near-Death Star like capability at this point, so blowing up Alderaan in the name of killing a few people on it the local government seems unwilling to seems like it should have a few checks and balances.

[JamesBarney]

So just for hosting?

If someone buys a rents a bunch of vms and use it to DDOS Amazon do they need a judges order then?

[vel0city]

AWS has somewhere around 30% marketshare in a market with well more than dozens of players. I have a hard time seeing it as a monopoly.

[gfodor]

I'm referring to monopoly power - which doesn't mean a singular entity. A good thought exercise to gauge this in this situation specifically is if it's only incidental that they were on AWS. If they were on Azure or GCP I think we can assume the same result would have occured.

[vel0city]

Good thing there's still more than AWS, GCP, and Azure in the cloud hosting market. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies willing to rent you computing hardware on the internet. There are dozens if not hundreds of colocations willing to rent you space, power, and network connectivity.

[gfodor]

For now.

[tshaddox]

Is there a feasible plan to obtain better power structures in the same time scales that these people are literally plotting to overthrow governments, murder political opponents, etc.?

[chmod600]

Twitter and FB got a lot of credit for the Arab Spring.

[noWeigh]

Seems like a difference between between overthrowing fascist religious minority in power and preventing fascist religious minority from rising to power?

Electoral college picks the President but two elections on and no popular vote wins for Trump.

If we’re talking about suppression of speech, seems like Trump was keen on doing that as well, on the backs of a political minority.

[gfodor]

There isn't a "deadline" to fixing these problems, they just need to be fixed. Unfortunately, like most things, fear will primarily guide our actions not sober analysis of the long-term unintended consequences of them.

[_jal]

On your second point, there will always be power structures. You can't not have them, when considering realistic arrangements made of humans.

So now what?

Is the complaint really that the gatekeepers are different than they were 30 or 100 years ago?

Or that there is no realistic alternative that could have acted, citing some authority you find more agreeable, in an effective timeframe?

[gfodor]

I would have much preferred if this action occurred due to a legal order, not a few CEOs making unilateral decisions. If they were bound to go through a form of due process before nuking people off of the Internet based upon speech which is assumed to be illegal, my guess is it would be much less likely to be abused. It certainly seems like such a system would have worked just fine in this situation and could be made extremely efficient.

I've argued for years having a few companies mediate all consequential human communication was going to be a big problem, so this happening to wake people up of the dangers isn't a surprise to me but just another stage of the process of people realizing it.

[res0nat0r]

The check and balance is working just fine in this case. Parler kept allowing people to post death threats, they didn't remove it because that's the entire reason their platform exists, and AWS enforced their TOS and stopped hosting them. They're free to go elsewhere.