[dgellow]

So, I'm not arguing one way or another, I just want to try out the following for the sake of discussion as I haven't seen it elsewhere: if we consider Amazon to be an infrastructure provider, and that by doing this they have a duty of neutrality, instead of shutting down Parler directly the approach would be to send a complain to a relevant federal authority (not sure which one that would be, maybe the FBI? please correct me) and let them do their investigation. If they find something considered bad enough to take the platform down, they would ask Amazon to take it offline. An argument for this is that it gives elected or at least government-related people some overview over the process instead of giving full power to private companies (which will backfire against the good people if normalized).

Please tell me why that would be bad, I'm interested to know.

[vel0city]

I expect common carriers to have a duty to neutrality and defer to at least some government agency with oversight before deciding to pull the plug.

There is one rail line to carry grain in and out of a community. That rail line is a common carrier. It shouldn't be able to arbitrarily decide whose cargo to carry or not.

There is realistically only one ISP at my home. That should be a common carrier. They shouldn't be able to arbitrarily choose which IP addresses I can connect to or not, or what ports I can choose to talk on. I realistically have no choice on who to choose for that, so there's no market for alternative providers for me.

AWS is not a common carrier. If you get dropped from AWS there's still Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM/Softlayer, Hertzner, Digital Ocean, Linode, Hostgator, Dreamhost, and so many other smaller cloud/VPS providers out there. And that's assuming you're for some reason entirely unable to roll your own hardware and move your app into a colo, of which there are literally hundreds of providers in the US alone. There is lots of competition in the cloud hosting industry, and if you widen it to the hosting industry in general its extremely wide.

[newacct583]

> instead of shutting down Parler directly the approach would be to send a complain to a relevant federal authority (not sure which one that would be, maybe the FBI? please correct me) and let them do their investigation.

It has been suggested by many people that in fact the causality goes the other way. The reason for the near-simultaneous action against Parler from Twilio, Google, Apple and Amazon seems likely to have been a strong suggestion from Federal law enforcement about an imminent threat.

There's no evidence for that per se, but certainly the threat seems imminent.

[dgellow]

I agree with your last sentence. If that's what actually happened, the situation is completely different and the general debate is really missing an important point.