Over on Ricochet, SkipSul takes exception to conservative's objections to AWS refusing to host Parler by comparing AWS to Masterpiece Cakes.
But then again, wasn’t Masterpiece Cakes engaged in a different sort of “censorship”? Wasn’t Masterpiece Cakes honored for exercising their right not to serve clientele in ways found unconscionable? The persistent lunatic who kept suing Masterpiece at one time demanded a satanic cake with protruding sex toys. If we honor Masterpiece Cakes for refusing such clientele, why are Amazon, Apple, and Google condemned for refusing Parler’s business? For that is what they have done.
I don't think this analogy works very well due to the tech oligarch's selective enforcement. They had no problem serving those on the left planning and conducting violent rioting last summer, all in violation of their terms of service. It is only now when some on the right do it that they have decided to deny service. Masterpiece Cakes was consistent in their decisions; Amazon, Apple and Google have not been.
In addition, according to Parler, Amazon seems to have violated their own policy, which stipulates that they will give 30 days notice before shutting off service, and they only gave Parler one week's notice.
That said, the normal position on the right is that people and businesses have the right to deny service if they want to. If you are denied service, well, "Bake your own cake!"
I'm not sure this applies with the tech oligarchs. I'm not sure at this point that it is possible to build your own Google, Amazon, or Apple. But who knows?
Whether it's right or wrong, I find the power of the tech oligarchs to shut companies and individuals down frightening. Nothing else in my life has been so close to Orwell's 1984.
15 comments:
There are problems with the Masterpiece Cakes comparison. A small business providing a custom creative service for which there are many alternatives is not the same thing as, say, a transportation monopoly such as a railroad which provides the only service in its area and is a common carrier.
FB and Twitter have something very close to monopoly status because of the critical mass effect. While these entities are not quite the same sort of thing as a common carrier railroad, they are a lot more like that then they are like a small bakery.
Also, a small business is an extension of its owner in a way that a large corporation, especially a publicly-traded corporation, is ot.
The SCOTUS held that a mining town couldn’t use its literal ownership of the town square (and indeed the whole town) to suppress political speech there. Union organizations couldn’t be refused permission to speak. Same here.
In principle. In fact, they will definitely be allowed to because the only party in power wants them to do so. Whether the SCOTUS will dare buck them, under threat of packing, remains to be seen.
Not only are they refusing service, the cancel crowd is after anyone else who provides service.
It's a war to suppress speech. At this point, they are de-facto publishers , or propagandists, to be more precise.
It's like the cake company followed the a-hole out the door, and went to every other cake company in the country, and told them not to bake the cake, and by the way we own all the flour mills too , be a shame if you could not get materials....
...and your employer wants to talk to you about your anti-Christian views, which might make Christian fellow employees feel unsafe, so they’ll be letting you go...
The tech giants are essentially saying that this group can make satanic cakes with protruding sex toys, but that one cannot because they are the wrong sort of satanic cakes and sex toys.
The Masterpiece Cakes analogy fails in a couple of ways. That was an owner religious freedom matter rather than a customer free speech matter. The MC analogy failure is emphasized (although this aspect isn't dispositive by itself) by the harassment factor of the troll litigant.
The much better analogy, I think, is the several cases that led to the Supreme Court saying diners (e.g.) can't discriminate against their customers, can't restrict their access to the diner, on the basis of race. The reasoning there was, and is, that the diners (et al.) had created themselves public spaces, and segregation is not allowed in public spaces.
So it is with Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. They've created themselves as public spaces--in the latter two's cases, explicitly--and so they should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of speech content. The monopoly aspect is a separate matter--the diners had no monopoly--and a valid antitrust question for the three, since the three appear to have colluded (though there's not yet proof of that).
The mining town case also is spot on.
Eric Hines
Your comment, AVI, reminds me of something a fellow UGA supporter said re: the recent bowl game:
“To root for Alabama because they’re in the SEC is like rooting for Satan because he’s in the Bible.”
I switched my browser to Dissenter, a free-speech-respecting provider that also blocks ads and invasive tracking. There was some initial resistance from Apple, which purely hates it, and requires you to go into System Preferences to wire around their attempt to block the download. I also finally managed to sign up on Gab, which is dealing with a flood of new customers fleeing the social media lockdown. Gab, which operates on its own proprietary servers, developed Dissenter from open-source Chromium software. The social media and tech giants swiftly moved to ban Dissenter from their app stores, but you don't actually need app stores.
Dissenter sounds similar to Brave, which is also a Chromium-based, privacy-focused browser. It was started by Brendan Eich, who had his own brush with being purged for his political sins by Mozilla.
How do you get around the Apple Store?
When you have time, let us know what you think of Gab.
I'm not quite clear on the details, but David brings up something interesting. As I understand it, because Masterpiece was a creative business, forcing them to make the cake would be compelling speech, which generally the government can't do.
Providing hosting services is an important line of business, but it isn't creative, so compelling AWS to continue hosting Parler would not violate that particular principle.
I don't think that Amazon should be forced to host Parler, though, beyond its own 30-day notice policy.
The app stores, however, are much more monopolistic, and I could see an argument that they should be required to keep the app available. I dunno.
To further clarify the speech issue differences as some have mentioned already, the cake baker is being required to produce 'content' against their beliefs, whereas on a (supposed) platform like Parler (or twitter) does not produce content- they are not the baker, the users are.
My wife and I are looking hard at Dissenter.
I've also opened accounts on Gab and CloudHub; although these are useless at present: their server and bandwidth capacity haven't caught up with demand, yet, so they're deucedly slow. I look forward to when they do catch up.
Eric Hines
Someone sent me an analysis by an individual who specializes in the terms & conditions of telecommunications companies. (Now *there* is a nice field!) She (the analyst) says that the 'upstream' providers...telcos and other Internet providers, companies providing interconnect services between Internet providers, etc) also now have terms & conditions which might allow them to terminate any hosting provider who hosts a site of which they disapprove. So we could potentially have not just secondary refusals-to-service...Amazon evicting Parler because of things that Parler users ostensibly said...but tertiary refusals...Galactic Telecom refusing to serve XYZ hosting because ZYZ serves Parler...or even further-removed refusals...QRS Interconnect refusing to serve Galactic Telecom because...
There certainly needs to be Common Carrier protection at least at the telco level and above.
I meant to say "Now *there* is a NICHE field!", but I guess it works the other way, too.
Ah. Nice to smell apocaypse in the morning. God is great. And humans need to learn a few more kessons.
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