Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.
It sounds like they had prepared to move from AWS to another mega-provider like GCP or Azure. The site is too large (and probably poorly optimized) to just spin up a few DO droplets.
I get that everyone just wants to shit on Parler, but AFAIK they didn't host any content that wasn't present in far greater quantity on Facebook and Twitter. It would have been reasonable to expect to have access to the same platforms as those companies.
However, given the predictable circumstances they might be in , they should at least expect every cloud provider to pull the plug at them, and should have gone the route of self-hosting. Instead, they have created a social media website out of Wordpress (out of all things), that performs ridiculously slow and eats up all of their maintenance budget, on AWS. It’s baffling how the right populists cannot find or hire any competent engineers; heck, on the leftist side people do far better with much less money (for example, look at Extinction Rebellion, where they manage to self-host their entire communications system: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_...)
I'm baffled by their choice of WordPress. No wonder they need so many servers.
I don't understand why they should have expected everyone to deplatform them. Facebook hosts the same content in far greater quantity and has clearly demonstrated that they can't moderate effectively, but there's no bulls-eye on them over that. What's different about Parler besides the ownership?
Depends on who you ask. I would be delighted to see a bulls-eye on Facebook for their complicity in what's been going on. I don't see them as significantly better in moral terms than Parler, and Facebook's body count for willingly collaborating with seditionists and genocide instigators is WAY WAY higher than Parler's.
Facebook is bigger, and has power.
That means that (a) they're harder to attack, and (b) they have purposes beyond ONLY fomenting insurrection and genocide. That means they'll operate in more of a gray area by intention, and will in fact try to self-moderate when the cost of fomenting insurrection and genocide risks becoming more expensive than the profit (ideological OR financial) for fomenting insurrection and genocide.
The difference between Parler and Facebook is, Facebook will take your money but then throw you under the bus if you're malicious and endangering their platform. Parler went down with the ship because it was more important to them than just taking the money.
You're right, they don't. We don't know what Twitter's contract with AWS says, but it's likely that Twitter doesn't have to play by the same rules as their much smaller competitors.
Proper planning would have been what, coloing hundreds of servers worth millions of dollars as a DR plan? And having no guarantee that the colo provider wouldn't also deplatform them?
Oh please. Colo those servers and don’t publicly expose your relationship with the colo provider, spin up frontend proxies on other providers to hide your backend.
This is basic stuff, the problem with Parler is that their team seems to have no experience hosting controversial content.
How much do you think their aws bill was per month for hundreds of servers? Their traffic bill alone was probably worth it already. Don’t contract this work to ibm or deloitte or something and you’ll be fine
I'm not talking about cost. I'm saying that surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.
I do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative.
If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?
Colo facility or your transit provider doesn’t have a brand name it has to protect. You can look at gab, 4chan, tpb etc for counter examples. I’m actually fairly certain they would be fine on oracle, tencent or alibaba too
In which case you'd need to moderate your content to match your providers' T&Cs, or you'd need to moderate your ambitions to match your choice of providers.
But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.
If Parler did that, how does that affect their time to market? Their ability to scale with growth? Maybe if they did that, they would still be operating, because they would have never hit critical mass to the point where anyone cared about Parler.
That works until your colo provider tells you to take a walk. Your landlord evicts you from warehouse where you host your backup datacenter space, your ISP cuts you off. It's almost like everybody drew the line at openly planning insurrection. Maybe they could have tried not doing that?
You're making a value judgment when my argument is simply about keeping your website alive in the face of powers that wish to control or censor you.
Imagine hypothetically that you have website about the plight of the Uyghurs and Amazon was a Chinese business.
Amazon's behavior revealed they are not above terminating service for businesses. I can imagine a world where they become emboldened and attempt to deny service to parties they don't like.
Perhaps you're hosted on AwS and they make an offer to acquire your business. Can they shut you off or raise your prices if you reject their offer? Can they escape antitrust scrutiny and use this as a strategy to low ball you?
I view the response to Parler as an operational test of the death star.
We have less and less power the larger these giants become.
Alternatively, pretend you're Isis, and want to start up a website on AWS so you can plan terrorist attacks on US soil, maybe blow up Jeff's ball's in Seattle?
I don't think we should force amazon to host ISIS' terrorist planning
And what if it happens with 0.01% of users on a popular Muslim social network?
What percentage of Parler users were advocating or planning for violent protest?
Also note that this stuff happens on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks all the time, and yet they're still online.
These are really messy gray areas, and the choices we're making will set precedents for our future.
There are so many potential responses by both the host and the service/platform. You can ask the network to deal with it (as they did with Parler), you can involve the FBI, invoke lawsuits... I don't think deplatforming is the second course of action to take when politely asking doesn't work out.
Was it even Amazon's prerogative to ask for content removal? It might be in their TOS, but what would the DOJ say?
Unless the FBI or CIA says it needs to go, I don't think it's Amazon's call. That should be our bar.
Social networks should be able to set their own rules and operate within the laws of the United States. Web hosts shouldn't meddle.
I don't buy this argument. Saying "because they banned parler they might lowball you on an aquisition offer and deny you service if you don't accept" is a complete non-sequitur.
As a society we make value judgements all the time. I think most people were in favor of shutting down parler. Most people are not in favor of letting AWS deny you service if you don't accept their aquisition offer and the response will be different.
