Interesting to see the mental gymnastics here from people that praised AWS/Google/Apple pulling Parler and it's servers down now decrying the move by this ISP while maintaining some sense of objectivity or at least trying not to appear hypocritical.
An ISP is only slightly upstream from being a cloud provider. An ISP is another private company with its own ToS; for example, your ISP does not allow you to distribute copyrighted material on torrent services (am I only the only one that's ever gotten that letter/email?). I'll try to preemptively address some points I think people will try to make:
- AWS booted Parler because of calls to violence, Twitter moderates its content
There are still endless violence inciting tweets on Twitter and they, too, are an AWS customer. AWS arbitrarily drew a line over what is enough moderation and what isn't, and then invoked its ToS. You can be on whatever side you like, but you can't say that it isn't still some human decision. AWS could boot Twitter off or it could keep Parler. They are a private company and they made a choice. This ISP should be afforded the same rights.
- Internet is more like a utility, it should be treated like a water pipe
Then the government can come in and socialize it. Until then its just another private service. I agree that the internet is now more important than it was 25 years ago, but we as a society haven't made that determination yet. At what point do we include cloud providers as a utility that should be managed by the state for the public's interest? AWS is over half of the cloud market share and cloud hosting is an increasingly more important service for innovation than it was 25 years ago (if it even existed at all in 1996).
- Parler can just go spin up there own servers
Ok, great. What is stopping Facebook or Twitter from running their own internet service?
- Internet infrastructure was partially publicly subsidized and/or funded
Still privately held and operated. Furthermore, its not like Facebook/Twitter/AWS were not without their own government grants, subsidies, etc. The mayor of San Francisco gave Twitter huge tax breaks to be HQ'd within the city. They are still at their discretion to boot people off of their platforms.
An ISP is only slightly upstream from being a cloud provider. An ISP is another private company with its own ToS; for example, your ISP does not allow you to distribute copyrighted material on torrent services (am I only the only one that's ever gotten that letter/email?). I'll try to preemptively address some points I think people will try to make:
- AWS booted Parler because of calls to violence, Twitter moderates its content
There are still endless violence inciting tweets on Twitter and they, too, are an AWS customer. AWS arbitrarily drew a line over what is enough moderation and what isn't, and then invoked its ToS. You can be on whatever side you like, but you can't say that it isn't still some human decision. AWS could boot Twitter off or it could keep Parler. They are a private company and they made a choice. This ISP should be afforded the same rights.
- Internet is more like a utility, it should be treated like a water pipe
Then the government can come in and socialize it. Until then its just another private service. I agree that the internet is now more important than it was 25 years ago, but we as a society haven't made that determination yet. At what point do we include cloud providers as a utility that should be managed by the state for the public's interest? AWS is over half of the cloud market share and cloud hosting is an increasingly more important service for innovation than it was 25 years ago (if it even existed at all in 1996).
- Parler can just go spin up there own servers
Ok, great. What is stopping Facebook or Twitter from running their own internet service?
- Internet infrastructure was partially publicly subsidized and/or funded
Still privately held and operated. Furthermore, its not like Facebook/Twitter/AWS were not without their own government grants, subsidies, etc. The mayor of San Francisco gave Twitter huge tax breaks to be HQ'd within the city. They are still at their discretion to boot people off of their platforms.