A Judge Tells Parler What Everybody Already Knew

So a federal judge in Seattle turned down Parler's request to force Amazon back into hosting it. This happened yesterday, the 21st. Judge Barbara Rothstein basically said what a lot of us have been saying since the whole thing started two weeks ago: AWS's terms of service let them boot a customer for violating content policies, and Parler not liking that fact doesn't make it an antitrust violation. Parler wanted a preliminary injunction, argued AWS and Twitter and Apple and Google were all colluding against them, and the judge wasn't having it. She wrote that Parler hadn't shown a likelihood of success on the merits, which is judge-speak for "this isn't going anywhere."

I dont think this is a hard call, honestly. Ive read AWS's acceptable use policy more times than any reasonable person should have to (more on that in a second) and its not exactly buried in legalese. You dont get to host a platform that was, by AWS's own account, slow to act on posts calling for violence, and then act shocked when the company that owns the servers decides its not worth the liability anymore. Thats not censorship in the constitutional sense people keep trying to make it. Its a business relationship ending because one party broke the contract.

What I find more interesting than the ruling itself is what it says about how fragile a lot of these "platforms" actually are underneath the branding. Parler wasnt really a company that owned infrastructure. It was a Rails app sitting on top of somebody elses servers, using somebody elses CDN, distributed through somebody elses app stores, and the second three of those four somebodies said no at roughly the same time, the whole thing evaporated. Ten million users and it went dark in about 24 hours. Thats not a conspiracy, thats just what happens when your entire existence depends on four or five companies choosing to keep doing business with you.

The self-hosting tangent I promised

I bring up the AWS terms of service because I actually got a warning email from a hosting provider once, years ago, back when techpad was running on a shared box from a company I wont name because I still feel a little embarrassed about it. Somebody had scraped one of my old posts and reposted it on a forum with a bunch of spammy backlinks pointed at my domain, and their abuse detection flagged my IP for "suspicious outbound link patterns." I had no idea what was happening, got a two-line email saying my account would be suspended in 48 hours, and spent an entire Saturday afternoon in 2013 trying to figure out who to even email back. Nobody colluded against me. Nobody was silencing my very important opinions about RSS readers. Some automated system saw a pattern that looked bad and I had to prove it wasnt. Eventually I moved to a $5 a month droplet and never looked back, partly because I wanted more control and partly because shared hosting support queues are a special kind of purgatory.

The point is, everybody who builds something online is a guest somewhere, at some level. Even self-hosting techpad off a droplet means Im a guest of DigitalOcean, and a guest of whoever runs the datacenter, and a guest of ICANN for the domain. You can push that dependency down a few layers but you cant get rid of it. Parler just found out what the bottom of that chain looks like when four or five layers decide at once that youre more trouble than youre worth.

None of this means the moderation calls made in the days after January 6th were automatically correct just because a judge sided with AWS on a contract question. Those are two different arguments and I see people mashing them together constantly, on both sides. The ruling doesnt say Parler was right or wrong to exist. It says Parler signed a contract that let AWS drop them, and AWS dropped them, and thats allowed. Thats it. Thats the whole ruling.

Parler says its looking for a new host and plans to come back. Ill believe it when I see it load in a browser again. In the meantime the bigger story this week is obviously the inauguration, and I dont have much to add there that a hundred other blogs havent already said better, so Ill leave it alone.