The deplatforming of Parler, mass calls to excommunicate those who basically supported a political opponent while being cheered by neoliberal zealots backed by an opportunistic corrupt class is the latest manifestation of the establishment authoritarians intent on burning dissent at the stake in the guise of protecting “Democracy. It’s …
The deplatforming of Parler, mass calls to excommunicate those who basically supported a political opponent while being cheered by neoliberal zealots backed by an opportunistic corrupt class is the latest manifestation of the establishment authoritarians intent on burning dissent at the stake in the guise of protecting “Democracy. It’s the kind of thing that happened during the Spanish Inquisition where a corrupt Catholic Church backed by moneyed classes defined what were allowable views or not with dire penalties for those who blasphemed. (Today that could mean not just being robbed of the ability to speak freely on social media, but loss of livelihood, ability to shop, bank, travel...and even subject to violence.)
What the US Empire in the throes of its latest orgy of hysteria against its never ending enemies - now fully turned inwards, in a blowback of historic proportions - may be missing is the reaction this is having in the rest of the World where US Big Tech is already viewed with deep suspicion due to their monopoly on data and information. What is especially disquieting is the knowledge that the CIA/NSA have their hooks in these companies which operate under US laws and jurisdictions and increasingly not even that. Amazon brazenly broke its contract with Parler without even a chance of a stay order. Lawyers even quit representing Parler with erstwhile civil libertarians like ACLU - which had once defended the rights of actual Nazis to march as part of their First Amendment Rights - joining in on the feeding frenzy. Even a serial killer has right of representation but ironically a serial killer will have a better chance of justice in the US than having a view that the 2020 election was unfair (which incidentally was the exact same thing Dems yammered on to cheers for 4 years with Clinton repeatedly calling Trump “illegitimate” and the 2016 election “stolen”.
If a sitting POTUS and tens of millions of his followers could be hounded in the US by tech monopolies and corporations clearly allied with a party that has gained power, ignoring US laws and precedent, what protection is there for other countries where US laws don’t even nominally apply?
Countries such as China and Russia have actively started building out their own verticals - hardware, networks, domain nodes, data centers, operating systems, social media applications - that don’t rely on the latest whims and politics of an Empire in the midst of a civil war between Establishment and anti-Establishment ideologies. Turkey is already accelerating its move away from WhatsApp into a home grown app. There are active calls in India - with its giant population and ubiquitous use of digital services even among the poor - which is almost entirely reliant on US technology, that these latest shenanigans in the US - against around half its *own* people - are the wake up call for digital independence. (This is akin to the increasing call for independence from the dollar by various countries - including China, Russia, India which are parts of RIC, SCO, BRICS organizations - since basically the dollar under the Obama and accelerated during the Trump admin has become a tool of raw US power to dictate who sovereign nations may trade with and who not.)
The left does have much in common with institutional religion these days — questioning dogma not allowed, excommunication and shunning for heretics, collusion with the governmental powers that be to eliminate dissenting views, etc. Ironically the ostensibly rationalist left are basically the new religious right — self-important moral busybodies who think it is their job to tell everyone else how they should think, feel and act.
Absolutely. What’s amazing and disheartening at the same time is that many of my peers, many PhDs in hard sciences where questioning established theories in rational ways is not only tolerated but encouraged, and who are wary of religious dogma - generally a hallmark of the right, have become brainwashed into not only not applying the same dispassionate rigor to the obviously messianic and hypocritical stances of the neoliberal authoritarians, but immediately shrieking “blasphemer” to anyone who points out the clearly self-serving contradictions in the pronouncements of this era’s High Priests of Moral Order.
Your comment doesn't make me think "other countries have wised up and are avoiding working with US Tech giants, and the US needs to constrain them, too". Your comment makes me think "other countries are taking control of the technology infrastructure using centralized control from authoritarian governments, in the United States the same thing is happening but under the control of an oligarchic technopolitical elite."
I am suggesting that assaults on neutrality (further commercial power grabs) are the logical progression of the events discussed here. I'm also suggesting that the most likely motivation for your reply is that you are an unhappy troll.
No, the most likely motivation for my reply is usage that strongly indicates the user didn't know what they were saying.
Few people in the USA actually know what the expression means.
"Net neutrality" is the principal that participants of a network need to treat all data traveling on the network identically, without regard to who it's from, who it's to, or what the content is.
That's fairly accurate. "Net neutrality" means that a private corporation can spend its money building infrastructure that then becomes de facto public property. The $20T plus cost of building the internet was paid for by private, not government, money. Now that others have spent their money, government feels entitled to lay claim to controlling it. It's the effective reverse of Obama's "You didn't build that."
Unfortunately, it isn't completely clear how this should be addressed. If ABC Corporation builds out a wired and wireless network for its use at a cost of $300B, why does it have to make the network equally available to its competitors? On the other hand, should ABC Corporation end up owning much of the nation's internet infrastructure, should it be allowed to deny use to others, or charge others different prices for the same services?
Reality is that, as almost always occurs, private money has built something and now government wants to appropriate it for its own use. Government can never be sufficiently nimble to do what private industry does, but it can always be sufficiently authoritarian to seize what it wants.
If access to food and healthcare are basic rights, isn't access to information a basic right as well? When philosophy hits reality, things rarely go well. I'm honestly not smart enough to know what to do here. I am smart enough to know that perhaps, as with roadways, the information superhighway must be made equally available to everyone, but not everyone is entitled to a Rolls Royce to drive on it.
That's profoundly ignorant about computer networking - and wrong.
Anyone can build out their own network and keep it for their own use or rent it out as they may see fit, charge whatever they want, change packet rates however they want - pay per performance, give priority to some users and not others, etc. Knock your lights out.
What you can't do is provide for the actual flow of the actual internet to go through and have those special treatment rules apply on the same network links; that's the price you pay for having it be a part of the actual internet. Any given network link can be private or on the public internet, but not both at the same time, and that's the issue.
If you want special treatment, fine, do it, not any problem at all, and you can connect in to the actual internet at multiple points if you want - not a problem at all. Each link can be one, public, the other, private, just not do both at the same time.
So your complaints are simply false and are based on a failed understanding of what the internet actually is and what you can and cannot do with it or other "private" networks. ... It's a lot like air travel; you can either own or rent a private jet to take you from New York to Los Angeles, or you can go with a "common carrier" like United Airlines, and there are advantages to either, but it's up to you to choose.
Your post is as technically accurate as it is irrelevant. The internet can be viewed as a technical marvel only understood by coders, or as the most powerful engine currently available to spread either authoritarian or libertarian propaganda and ideas. Your immediate kneejerk reaction is to demonstrate others' inferiority for whatever reward that brings you. The internet, in the framework of this discussion, is a monstrously powerful tool, which can be used by authoritarians to crush dissent, or libertarians to raise dissent.
This isn't left/right, R/D, or technology/utility. We are about to initiate an administration with severely abusive authoritarian desires, intent on driving all dissent underground. It can then claim unity, because none dare dissent. It can claim security, by subjugating other countries to its will. It can claim purity, with blood on its hands. And none dare dissent.
Your misreading of what the internet is disappoints. It is a tool built and paid for by private industry that will be confiscated by government for its own purposes. And egoists who jockey for superior position by putting down others will never notice.
Yeah, with organizations responsible for such critical Internet and Web infrastructure as top-level domains being based in the USA, there are risks to neutrality (see what almost happened with .org). IMHO these kind of institutions should be on their own or "UN" soil (like embassies), and be located somewhere more neutral, like Geneva, Switzerland (for instance).
If Parler restarts on its own infrastructure, we still may see people go after them by preventing the backbone from pointing to them. That would be a calamity.
The strange thing, to me, of Glenn’s post is that AWS absolutely does not have a monopoly here. Sure, they only gave them a couple days to move their site to another service. But move it, they can. Of course, Parler then proved how poorly they were handling the privacy of their users, and how poorly the entire site was developed.
Those are not back up services. Those are other services that run things like “log in authentication” and “notifications.” They are complementary services, and again, there are plenty of alternatives.
You seem to be implying that somehow it’s Parler’s fault that they couldn’t move their code and get them up and running in 48 hrs because of “poor code”. (It’s akin to blaming a woman for getting molested because she was wearing a short skirt).
It’s not easy to move a whole infrastructure, storage, servers, two-factor-authentication service providers etc in the best of times eg to create a fully functional hot back-up disaster recovery setup requires months though with providers like AWS, a lot of it is turnkey - which is why they are so popular.
Incidentally Gab had the same issue years ago when they were nearly erased. They apparently learnt from that and built a more robust big-tech proof infrastructure. Though as per latest rumor they may also be under threat of getting their domain name deregistered with ICANN in which case you’d have to find them via direct IP.
There were times when real estate agents would not sell homes to black people in white neighborhoods because they would bring down prices. After all the black people could go elsewhere. It was simply “good business”.
Thankfully society realized that this “good business” was discriminatory and laws were passed against such activities.
We’ll await the lawsuit Parler has launched vs Amazon for breaching their 30 day rule (let alone any monopolistic collusion)
Another very bad analogy, Galileo! Red lining was a discriminatory practice against a protected class. It specifically targeted a group of people based on their race. You cannot compare that with Amazon choosing to sever a relationship with a company that they believe is being used to foment violence.
"No shirt, no shoes, no service" is not at all the same as "no blacks allowed". Are these truly your arguments?
You seem to be twisting yourself into pretzels simply to support Apple/Google/Amazion companies with enormous power and heft in the marketplace to collectively kick out competitors to their business - illegally I might add (though by the time courts fully decide, the victim will long be dead) - under paper thin reasons, simply to justify your fairly transparent politics of the moment.
Your “arguments” range from “well they are private companies that can do what they like”; to “they are not monopolies, there are other options for Parler” to “it’s just good business.”
The excuse they - and you - are giving is a sham.
Firstly Apple/Google/Amazon are not some disinterested private parties removed from ties to political parties. Silicon Valley is closely tied to the Dem establishment with a fast moving revolving door. It’s an open secret. It’s as much an open secret as Oil companies being closely tied with the GOP of old. It’s as much an open secret as the incoming Treasury and Defense Secretary ties with Wall Street and the Military complex. In fact I’m not even sure anyone is pretending it’s a secret. Biden can just give a medal of freedom to Cook, Pichai, Bezos next month just to rub it in.
This was a politically sanctioned throttling of a platform that the incoming political party’s political opponents were herded into in the first place, just because they could (without even having to give any proof Parler had any more hate than Twitter/YouTube had as Greenwald points out. The beauty of this system is that if for example the Govt controlled the platforms they would at least be obligated to prove their accusations; private companies in this case have little obligation.)
Secondly at the time redlining was being done it was politically and socially sanctioned in the areas this was practiced with the same arguments you’re using to justify forcing unpopular groups into your space being used: “they’re just private companies; there are other options; it’s just good business” It took a while to society to understand the inherent dangers of this. Eventually when it bites Neoliberals in the ass, they will started complaining too.
Thirdly, Parler is a direct competitor to Twitter. It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that Dorsey triumphantly posted a pic of the top apps in Apple’s App Store without Parler at No 1 after Apple pulled the plug with 24 hrs notice. He was just reminding everyone of the enormous power he had to first throw people of his platform with little transparency and then to crush any competing platforms they had to flock to.
Fourthly, even the Dems earlier railed against Apple/Amazon/Google etc as unfettered monopolies and expressed disquiet about their enormous power. The same is going on in far more liberal Europe. Of course when this enormous power aligns with them - great! Then suddenly it’s all about private companies doing what they like - the GOP argument when enormously wealthy companies supported them in the past.
While it’s amusing at one level from the outside to see these two corrupt parties in a 2-party duopoly and their supporters switching stances to suit their power plays within the increasingly dysfunctional country hilariously named the “United” States, at another level these Big Tech/Big Gov fusion is being treated with alarm even by those who don’t like Trump from the Merkel to Obrador (the point of my original post and what Greenwald has written about) where all these paper-thin justifications are seen for that they are: exercises in raw unaccountable power for political purposes.
I should clarify that I never expressed "support" for the actions of these companies against Parler. Neither did I condemn it. My personal opinion is that we should have many many more Twitter clones like Parler. I am pro-federated internet services, splintered like crazy, I'm not a fan of big tech, and I think the internet is kinda lame these days because of how limited our options are.
However, Parler just seems like a cheap cash-in by various religious extremist backers to harness the interest of a particular group. Glenn referred to the site as privacy focused. They're not: they require a picture of your drivers license (and a video of yourself). And they were recently victims of a massive hack that exposed those drivers licenses, and the private messages, of all (or most?) of their users.
We should call a spade a spade, and not talk them up like something great just for the sake of making a counterpoint (not really saying you were doing that - but Glenn seemed to be).
But yes, I did rationalize them getting their services cut. I mean, I hear you - and I think you are making some wise points - but one difference (that you seem aware of) between Twitter and Parler is that Twitter is coming to the table and listening to the (as I said in another comment) tech-illiterate blowhards in office and attempting to appease them. While Parler isn't. Yes, both sites are pieces of crap and have awful users on them, but of the two, only Twitter is attempting to say, "We know this group of people are using our site to plan some shit on Jan 20th - and we're dedicating x resources to monitoring and managing it." While Parler isn't. So as an emergency measure - because this seems like a genuine emergency to a lot of people - it seems more acceptable to break contracts and deplatform them in this time of need. This isn't simply about killing competition.
> It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that Dorsey triumphantly posted a pic of the top apps in Apple’s App Store without Parler at No 1 after Apple pulled the plug with 24 hrs notice.
This seems like it did escape your notice in some way. He posted a pic of only the #1 app, Signal. And he is responding to Elon Musk's, and other's, recent support for Signal - and not Whatsapp - as a secure messenger.
Has it escaped your attention that the far left also feels censored by Twitter/Facebook (because they are)? My take is that these companies want to serve the middle. Right now the Trump/Qanon group is far from the middle, and they are kinda going nuts.
Again, I think you make good points, and I'm not arguing against everything you've said. I just don't quite see the legacy of this being similar to redlining, and I think Big Tech's relationship with the gov is more fluid and opportunistic than you consider it.
Did you even read the GG article? All these tech monopolies have much worse content on their platforms that they ignore for political reasons. It is pure hypocrisy of the worst sort and is obvious.
AWS is not a monopoly, but they clearly exerted monopolistic power in conjunction with Apple and Google. Once the tech giants crossed that Rubicon, they have run afoul of the antitrust statutes. Unfortunately for Parler antitrust litigation is likely to take the best part of 10 years.
I and other early users of CompuServe recall how poorly the site functioned in its youth. Parler is today's CompuServe, except nobody was trying to destroy CompuServe while it got its act together.
AWS does not have a monopoly, but Amazon has shown it will muscle aside dissent and competition. Eventually nearly all web traffic flows through a server controlled by FAANG. It has become a self-appointed world government in control of information.
The deplatforming of Parler, mass calls to excommunicate those who basically supported a political opponent while being cheered by neoliberal zealots backed by an opportunistic corrupt class is the latest manifestation of the establishment authoritarians intent on burning dissent at the stake in the guise of protecting “Democracy. It’s the kind of thing that happened during the Spanish Inquisition where a corrupt Catholic Church backed by moneyed classes defined what were allowable views or not with dire penalties for those who blasphemed. (Today that could mean not just being robbed of the ability to speak freely on social media, but loss of livelihood, ability to shop, bank, travel...and even subject to violence.)
What the US Empire in the throes of its latest orgy of hysteria against its never ending enemies - now fully turned inwards, in a blowback of historic proportions - may be missing is the reaction this is having in the rest of the World where US Big Tech is already viewed with deep suspicion due to their monopoly on data and information. What is especially disquieting is the knowledge that the CIA/NSA have their hooks in these companies which operate under US laws and jurisdictions and increasingly not even that. Amazon brazenly broke its contract with Parler without even a chance of a stay order. Lawyers even quit representing Parler with erstwhile civil libertarians like ACLU - which had once defended the rights of actual Nazis to march as part of their First Amendment Rights - joining in on the feeding frenzy. Even a serial killer has right of representation but ironically a serial killer will have a better chance of justice in the US than having a view that the 2020 election was unfair (which incidentally was the exact same thing Dems yammered on to cheers for 4 years with Clinton repeatedly calling Trump “illegitimate” and the 2016 election “stolen”.
If a sitting POTUS and tens of millions of his followers could be hounded in the US by tech monopolies and corporations clearly allied with a party that has gained power, ignoring US laws and precedent, what protection is there for other countries where US laws don’t even nominally apply?
Countries such as China and Russia have actively started building out their own verticals - hardware, networks, domain nodes, data centers, operating systems, social media applications - that don’t rely on the latest whims and politics of an Empire in the midst of a civil war between Establishment and anti-Establishment ideologies. Turkey is already accelerating its move away from WhatsApp into a home grown app. There are active calls in India - with its giant population and ubiquitous use of digital services even among the poor - which is almost entirely reliant on US technology, that these latest shenanigans in the US - against around half its *own* people - are the wake up call for digital independence. (This is akin to the increasing call for independence from the dollar by various countries - including China, Russia, India which are parts of RIC, SCO, BRICS organizations - since basically the dollar under the Obama and accelerated during the Trump admin has become a tool of raw US power to dictate who sovereign nations may trade with and who not.)
The left does have much in common with institutional religion these days — questioning dogma not allowed, excommunication and shunning for heretics, collusion with the governmental powers that be to eliminate dissenting views, etc. Ironically the ostensibly rationalist left are basically the new religious right — self-important moral busybodies who think it is their job to tell everyone else how they should think, feel and act.
Absolutely. What’s amazing and disheartening at the same time is that many of my peers, many PhDs in hard sciences where questioning established theories in rational ways is not only tolerated but encouraged, and who are wary of religious dogma - generally a hallmark of the right, have become brainwashed into not only not applying the same dispassionate rigor to the obviously messianic and hypocritical stances of the neoliberal authoritarians, but immediately shrieking “blasphemer” to anyone who points out the clearly self-serving contradictions in the pronouncements of this era’s High Priests of Moral Order.
Your comment doesn't make me think "other countries have wised up and are avoiding working with US Tech giants, and the US needs to constrain them, too". Your comment makes me think "other countries are taking control of the technology infrastructure using centralized control from authoritarian governments, in the United States the same thing is happening but under the control of an oligarchic technopolitical elite."
Best comment award. ☆☆☆☆☆
Indeed. Please start your own sub stack Galileo ;)
The elephant in the room is international net neutrality.
You obviously have no idea what "net neutrality" even means.
I am suggesting that assaults on neutrality (further commercial power grabs) are the logical progression of the events discussed here. I'm also suggesting that the most likely motivation for your reply is that you are an unhappy troll.
No, the most likely motivation for my reply is usage that strongly indicates the user didn't know what they were saying.
Few people in the USA actually know what the expression means.
"Net neutrality" is the principal that participants of a network need to treat all data traveling on the network identically, without regard to who it's from, who it's to, or what the content is.
That's fairly accurate. "Net neutrality" means that a private corporation can spend its money building infrastructure that then becomes de facto public property. The $20T plus cost of building the internet was paid for by private, not government, money. Now that others have spent their money, government feels entitled to lay claim to controlling it. It's the effective reverse of Obama's "You didn't build that."
Unfortunately, it isn't completely clear how this should be addressed. If ABC Corporation builds out a wired and wireless network for its use at a cost of $300B, why does it have to make the network equally available to its competitors? On the other hand, should ABC Corporation end up owning much of the nation's internet infrastructure, should it be allowed to deny use to others, or charge others different prices for the same services?
Reality is that, as almost always occurs, private money has built something and now government wants to appropriate it for its own use. Government can never be sufficiently nimble to do what private industry does, but it can always be sufficiently authoritarian to seize what it wants.
If access to food and healthcare are basic rights, isn't access to information a basic right as well? When philosophy hits reality, things rarely go well. I'm honestly not smart enough to know what to do here. I am smart enough to know that perhaps, as with roadways, the information superhighway must be made equally available to everyone, but not everyone is entitled to a Rolls Royce to drive on it.
That's profoundly ignorant about computer networking - and wrong.
Anyone can build out their own network and keep it for their own use or rent it out as they may see fit, charge whatever they want, change packet rates however they want - pay per performance, give priority to some users and not others, etc. Knock your lights out.
What you can't do is provide for the actual flow of the actual internet to go through and have those special treatment rules apply on the same network links; that's the price you pay for having it be a part of the actual internet. Any given network link can be private or on the public internet, but not both at the same time, and that's the issue.
If you want special treatment, fine, do it, not any problem at all, and you can connect in to the actual internet at multiple points if you want - not a problem at all. Each link can be one, public, the other, private, just not do both at the same time.
So your complaints are simply false and are based on a failed understanding of what the internet actually is and what you can and cannot do with it or other "private" networks. ... It's a lot like air travel; you can either own or rent a private jet to take you from New York to Los Angeles, or you can go with a "common carrier" like United Airlines, and there are advantages to either, but it's up to you to choose.
Your post is as technically accurate as it is irrelevant. The internet can be viewed as a technical marvel only understood by coders, or as the most powerful engine currently available to spread either authoritarian or libertarian propaganda and ideas. Your immediate kneejerk reaction is to demonstrate others' inferiority for whatever reward that brings you. The internet, in the framework of this discussion, is a monstrously powerful tool, which can be used by authoritarians to crush dissent, or libertarians to raise dissent.
This isn't left/right, R/D, or technology/utility. We are about to initiate an administration with severely abusive authoritarian desires, intent on driving all dissent underground. It can then claim unity, because none dare dissent. It can claim security, by subjugating other countries to its will. It can claim purity, with blood on its hands. And none dare dissent.
Your misreading of what the internet is disappoints. It is a tool built and paid for by private industry that will be confiscated by government for its own purposes. And egoists who jockey for superior position by putting down others will never notice.
Zero bandwidth prioritization.
Yeah, with organizations responsible for such critical Internet and Web infrastructure as top-level domains being based in the USA, there are risks to neutrality (see what almost happened with .org). IMHO these kind of institutions should be on their own or "UN" soil (like embassies), and be located somewhere more neutral, like Geneva, Switzerland (for instance).
If Parler restarts on its own infrastructure, we still may see people go after them by preventing the backbone from pointing to them. That would be a calamity.
In other news, one of the pirate bay founders mocked Parler (and… Gab??) for not being able to keep their website up.
They might, but I can hardly see it succeeding, considering how thepiratebay or stormfront are still up…
an apt description of Peter Thiel's deplatforming of Gawker settle a grudge.
Wasn’t that by court order due to Gawker’s defamation? Was there a court order requiring that Parler be shut down?
a court order resultant from Thiel's deep pockets financing the legal fees that authored the defamation suit and delivered the court order.
There is a legal system for the wealthy and one for everyone else.
A court order...from Florida. Judge Gong-Show... https://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/trial-judge-in-hulk-hogan-gawker-case-is-most-reversed-in-pinellas/2270818/
The strange thing, to me, of Glenn’s post is that AWS absolutely does not have a monopoly here. Sure, they only gave them a couple days to move their site to another service. But move it, they can. Of course, Parler then proved how poorly they were handling the privacy of their users, and how poorly the entire site was developed.
All their back-up services who they thought they could move their code to dropped out virtually on the same day. It was a fairly coordinated attack. See eg https://deadline.com/2021/01/parler-ceo-says-service-dropped-by-every-vendor-and-could-end-the-company-1234670607/
Those are not back up services. Those are other services that run things like “log in authentication” and “notifications.” They are complementary services, and again, there are plenty of alternatives.
You seem to be implying that somehow it’s Parler’s fault that they couldn’t move their code and get them up and running in 48 hrs because of “poor code”. (It’s akin to blaming a woman for getting molested because she was wearing a short skirt).
It’s not easy to move a whole infrastructure, storage, servers, two-factor-authentication service providers etc in the best of times eg to create a fully functional hot back-up disaster recovery setup requires months though with providers like AWS, a lot of it is turnkey - which is why they are so popular.
Incidentally Gab had the same issue years ago when they were nearly erased. They apparently learnt from that and built a more robust big-tech proof infrastructure. Though as per latest rumor they may also be under threat of getting their domain name deregistered with ICANN in which case you’d have to find them via direct IP.
I read it the same way.
“It’s akin to blaming a woman for getting molested because she was wearing a short skirt”
My goodness. Good effort trying to score a quick point there. But that’s a poor analogy. And you misread what I was implying.
I agree that it was not surmountable to smoothly transition in two days.
That's not the point and you know it.
The point is that these private companies have decided it’s not good business to serve this customer. Now this customer can move to other services.
There were times when real estate agents would not sell homes to black people in white neighborhoods because they would bring down prices. After all the black people could go elsewhere. It was simply “good business”.
Thankfully society realized that this “good business” was discriminatory and laws were passed against such activities.
We’ll await the lawsuit Parler has launched vs Amazon for breaching their 30 day rule (let alone any monopolistic collusion)
Another very bad analogy, Galileo! Red lining was a discriminatory practice against a protected class. It specifically targeted a group of people based on their race. You cannot compare that with Amazon choosing to sever a relationship with a company that they believe is being used to foment violence.
"No shirt, no shoes, no service" is not at all the same as "no blacks allowed". Are these truly your arguments?
You seem to be twisting yourself into pretzels simply to support Apple/Google/Amazion companies with enormous power and heft in the marketplace to collectively kick out competitors to their business - illegally I might add (though by the time courts fully decide, the victim will long be dead) - under paper thin reasons, simply to justify your fairly transparent politics of the moment.
Your “arguments” range from “well they are private companies that can do what they like”; to “they are not monopolies, there are other options for Parler” to “it’s just good business.”
The excuse they - and you - are giving is a sham.
Firstly Apple/Google/Amazon are not some disinterested private parties removed from ties to political parties. Silicon Valley is closely tied to the Dem establishment with a fast moving revolving door. It’s an open secret. It’s as much an open secret as Oil companies being closely tied with the GOP of old. It’s as much an open secret as the incoming Treasury and Defense Secretary ties with Wall Street and the Military complex. In fact I’m not even sure anyone is pretending it’s a secret. Biden can just give a medal of freedom to Cook, Pichai, Bezos next month just to rub it in.
This was a politically sanctioned throttling of a platform that the incoming political party’s political opponents were herded into in the first place, just because they could (without even having to give any proof Parler had any more hate than Twitter/YouTube had as Greenwald points out. The beauty of this system is that if for example the Govt controlled the platforms they would at least be obligated to prove their accusations; private companies in this case have little obligation.)
Secondly at the time redlining was being done it was politically and socially sanctioned in the areas this was practiced with the same arguments you’re using to justify forcing unpopular groups into your space being used: “they’re just private companies; there are other options; it’s just good business” It took a while to society to understand the inherent dangers of this. Eventually when it bites Neoliberals in the ass, they will started complaining too.
Thirdly, Parler is a direct competitor to Twitter. It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that Dorsey triumphantly posted a pic of the top apps in Apple’s App Store without Parler at No 1 after Apple pulled the plug with 24 hrs notice. He was just reminding everyone of the enormous power he had to first throw people of his platform with little transparency and then to crush any competing platforms they had to flock to.
Fourthly, even the Dems earlier railed against Apple/Amazon/Google etc as unfettered monopolies and expressed disquiet about their enormous power. The same is going on in far more liberal Europe. Of course when this enormous power aligns with them - great! Then suddenly it’s all about private companies doing what they like - the GOP argument when enormously wealthy companies supported them in the past.
While it’s amusing at one level from the outside to see these two corrupt parties in a 2-party duopoly and their supporters switching stances to suit their power plays within the increasingly dysfunctional country hilariously named the “United” States, at another level these Big Tech/Big Gov fusion is being treated with alarm even by those who don’t like Trump from the Merkel to Obrador (the point of my original post and what Greenwald has written about) where all these paper-thin justifications are seen for that they are: exercises in raw unaccountable power for political purposes.
I should clarify that I never expressed "support" for the actions of these companies against Parler. Neither did I condemn it. My personal opinion is that we should have many many more Twitter clones like Parler. I am pro-federated internet services, splintered like crazy, I'm not a fan of big tech, and I think the internet is kinda lame these days because of how limited our options are.
However, Parler just seems like a cheap cash-in by various religious extremist backers to harness the interest of a particular group. Glenn referred to the site as privacy focused. They're not: they require a picture of your drivers license (and a video of yourself). And they were recently victims of a massive hack that exposed those drivers licenses, and the private messages, of all (or most?) of their users.
Furthermore, they are being lauded - by folks like Glenn - as a bastion for free speech. That isn't true, either. They "censor" folks, just like Twitter does: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days.shtml
We should call a spade a spade, and not talk them up like something great just for the sake of making a counterpoint (not really saying you were doing that - but Glenn seemed to be).
But yes, I did rationalize them getting their services cut. I mean, I hear you - and I think you are making some wise points - but one difference (that you seem aware of) between Twitter and Parler is that Twitter is coming to the table and listening to the (as I said in another comment) tech-illiterate blowhards in office and attempting to appease them. While Parler isn't. Yes, both sites are pieces of crap and have awful users on them, but of the two, only Twitter is attempting to say, "We know this group of people are using our site to plan some shit on Jan 20th - and we're dedicating x resources to monitoring and managing it." While Parler isn't. So as an emergency measure - because this seems like a genuine emergency to a lot of people - it seems more acceptable to break contracts and deplatform them in this time of need. This isn't simply about killing competition.
> It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that Dorsey triumphantly posted a pic of the top apps in Apple’s App Store without Parler at No 1 after Apple pulled the plug with 24 hrs notice.
This seems like it did escape your notice in some way. He posted a pic of only the #1 app, Signal. And he is responding to Elon Musk's, and other's, recent support for Signal - and not Whatsapp - as a secure messenger.
Has it escaped your attention that the far left also feels censored by Twitter/Facebook (because they are)? My take is that these companies want to serve the middle. Right now the Trump/Qanon group is far from the middle, and they are kinda going nuts.
Again, I think you make good points, and I'm not arguing against everything you've said. I just don't quite see the legacy of this being similar to redlining, and I think Big Tech's relationship with the gov is more fluid and opportunistic than you consider it.
Where did you get the idea that Europe was far more liberal ? Have you seen UK libel laws, or the various Internet-related laws of the recent years ?
Did you even read the GG article? All these tech monopolies have much worse content on their platforms that they ignore for political reasons. It is pure hypocrisy of the worst sort and is obvious.
I did. I think one difference is that Twitter et al meets with all the politicians and makes gestures toward moderating/whatever to appease the tech-illtierate blowhards in office. While Parler just said, no way, we're not coming to the table. All the while Parler, of course, is actively "censoring" their users just like all these platforms are. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days.shtml
It’s not Congress that is censoring and destroying Parler. Why would it matter if Parler met with Congress?
AWS is not a monopoly, but they clearly exerted monopolistic power in conjunction with Apple and Google. Once the tech giants crossed that Rubicon, they have run afoul of the antitrust statutes. Unfortunately for Parler antitrust litigation is likely to take the best part of 10 years.
As of today, I believe the CEO of Parler and his family are in hiding due to death threats.
I and other early users of CompuServe recall how poorly the site functioned in its youth. Parler is today's CompuServe, except nobody was trying to destroy CompuServe while it got its act together.
AWS does not have a monopoly, but Amazon has shown it will muscle aside dissent and competition. Eventually nearly all web traffic flows through a server controlled by FAANG. It has become a self-appointed world government in control of information.