Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm
reuters.comRelated disuccsion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829794 The Russian firm is providing DDoS protection, it's not clear where, or by whom, the website is hosted.
Let’s ask the naive question here. Why would an American company go to Russia to exercise their American right to free speech?
Because no American company wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
People get confused about the difference between free expression, and compelling companies to support that expression.
Your statement is true. Its also true that the tech market is too consolidated to be considered a free market.
True. But there's nothing stopping Parler from running their own servers either. There's many controversial physical businesses in the US that would have trouble renting. But nothing stops them from buying their own land.
That's the issue with Parler hosting. With hosting, you're digitally renting.
It's more complicated than that because other companies that aren't related to hosting decided to refuse service to Parler. Mastercard, Twilio, various Law Firms, and others. The truth is that running any service of scale requires dozens of other companies from other industries.
True. And most companies would decide it wasn't economical to run such a controversial site at scale.
But this is being painted as "monopolies against free speech", and it's not. There's hundreds, maybe thousands of hosting companies. At least dozens of ways to take payments. Thousands of law firms.
I think everyone is in agreement that big tech has too much influence. But big tech isn't what's keeping Parler off the web. It's not "leftists" either. It's legal liability for things like the capital riots.
Legal liability, aka the threat of government is what's keeping Parker offline. Not big tech. All the US companies are just falling in line, protecting themselves from lawsuits and expensive court cases
The biggest issue is really the app stores. If hosting keeps consolidating the way it is, it will be on par in future years. And the reason Parler didn't build its own servers is because its massively expensive to do so. So expensive that its a non-starter rather than an inconvenience. Giving preferential treatment to some startups but not others to cut the corner on hosting by dominant players which determines winners and losers is still not a free market.
Anyone with enough money can enter the market. Parler is funded by a billionaire. She just has to spend more of her money to compete or acquire what she needs.
I'm starting to think the "Free Market" doesn't exist and it's really just a platonic ideal.
Free markets exist when the DOJ does its job.
Do you mean that the very existence of free markets depends on strict governmental regulation?
Without state intervention, free market don't remain free on its own?
So, what is free about free markets?
This is how Adam Smith described free markets, potentially influenced by regulation to ensure monopolies and rent seeking didn't exist.
In that framing, the market is free from economic privilege, and individual actors are free to compete on equal footing.
Thanks, this makes sense.
What confuses me is the overloading of "free market" to mean something opposed to government intervention.
Government set the rules in free markets. A free market is a competitive market with even rules for all participants.
Yes, lots of anti-regulation people have taken a specific brand of free-market capitalism (arguably even an extremist brand of laissez-faire free-market capitalism) and tried to make that the only "real" market economy.
Free market socialism isn't a contradiction, despite what many would have you believe (think: worker owned co-operatives and nonprofits that compete in the broader market).
Similarly, market economies need not be wholly unregulated to be good. And indeed, I think you'd be hard pressed to find mainstream economists who claim that worker safety regulations are bad (like, they might be able to point to particular regulations that are dumb, but there are many that are not).
Seems like a general concept. The concept of government is actually a forceful limitation on the powers that would be exercised in a state of anarchy. Otherwise theres no distinction between ‘government’ run by a dictator, and anarchy with a singularly powerful individual. Of course the distinction can be rationalized away further in terms of collective power until the only thing left is a theocracy. But practically, .... actually I don’t know anymore.
The concept that the govt is a director of the free markets and ensure they remain competitive is older than years you have on this earth.
Why not? What are all the American companies afraid of?
Being complicit in insurrection. Insurrection itself, for that matter, but the part that hits close to home is that they might be blamed for being involved.
Everybody got real nervous when people invaded the US Congress in order to stop it from certifying an election. Regardless of what you call that event, it was very illegal, and nobody wants to be anywhere near it should it happen again.
This seems like a uniquely internet concern. Nobody seems to hold accountable the supply chains of controversial offline products.
Because they both support sedition against the USA. Anything that furthers turmoil in the US is to Russia's advantage. The Government did not shut down Parler, the free market did. Parler is free to set up their own infrastructure.
Perhaps Rebekah Mercer, the big money behind them, can buy a data center to house their servers, she has the money to do so. Or she can purchase a cloud/ISP company to house her other properties like Brietbart.
>The Government did not shut down Parler, the free market did
Amazon's been receiving cia, military and other US government contracts for years now.
https://theatlantic.com/article/374632/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/08/75349/meet-ameri...
https://aws.amazon.com/contract-center/#federal
Amazon took a website off their services critical of the government and incoming administration.
If amazon did this to a company critical of one of their private contract companies, this would be anti-trust behaviour.
> If amazon did this to a company critical of one of their private contract companies, this would be anti-trust behaviour.
No it wouldn't be. That is not how anti-trust works. Amazon doesn't need to rent servers to Walmart. Walmart doesn't need to rent storage space or placement to Amazon. There's nothing in anti-trust which compells companies to have to provide services to one another.
If people want to talk about these issues they need to frame it in terms of strengthening anti-discrimination laws for speech. If that's something we want to talk about it's valid - it's just not the route most people getting angry about this want to take since it would run against many other opinions they've made previously (Masterpiece Cakeshop, et al.)
I can't understand why these platforms are being treated just like any other private company to be honest.
These companies openly take billions of dollars in government subsidies and tax breaks, most of them have one or more contracts with the US government, several of them received funding from the government during their early days, without which, there's a chance they may not be the giants they are today.
How much money should tax payers continue funding these massive corporations before they should finally get a say in their actions?
These companies willingly accept these billions of dollars, wllingly chose to put themselves in the position of being the 'new town square', then they hide behind the 'nope private company' argument.
All I know is, when I was working off government subsidies and grants years ago, i was publically accountable for anything we did and we had far less public impact than any of these companies.
People can argue laws and semantics all they want, but what will it actually take for people to actually recognize the power these companies have over nearly every aspect of modern life and stop just treating them as
'Any other private company'.
That's an excuse and as far as i'm concerned a completely bullshit one. It's very obvious that's not the case and how anyone can deny this is mind boggling to me.
> The Government did not shut down Parler, the free market did.
The new inception of the Moral Majority did.
Again, the Government did not. Rebekah Mercer and the Koch family et al are free to acquire a datacenter or cloud hosting company and build out a payments infrastructure as well. Nothing is stopping them from doing so.
I'm sure Rupert Murdoch would also be glad to contribute as well. Let capitalism thrive! AWS, Stripe, Paypal, GoFundMe have zero OBLIGATION to provide services to them.
An oligopoly is not an example of the "Free Market". It's the opposite.
No government body was restricting their free speech. It was only the free market refusing to do business with them.
"free market" aka 2 coordinating app stores with complete dominance. Server hosting is a step down in oligopoly behavior but its consolidating fast.
Android devices allow side loading, and as noted, you don't need an app to use Parler.
Server hosting is still entirely a commodity.
"Cloud Providers" are also a (smaller) commodity. Vendor tie-in (to things like AWS) is a problem for a number of businesses entirely less controversial than Parler.
> Android devices allow side loading
Possibly not for long, though. There has been speculation that Google will push to have its "Advanced Protection" model extended to mass-market phones. This would make it impossible to side-load apps, except for that tiny minority of nerds like us who know how to enable ADB and push the app to the device over the command line.
And I get get into the cake store by going through the dark alley and into the back entrance even though the front door sign says closed. Everyone knows the reach is drastically limited, which is the entire point.
I'm sorry, remind me again what inherent right you have to a third party paying to ensure you have bright lights and big signs on your front door?
Parler does not need a app, they can be a fully functioning site for conservative hate speech by using the latest in web technology. They don't need a app.
Rights are only as good as what your peers are willing to accept. I am sure everyone in the US would agree you have the right to speak your ideas aloud, practice whatever religion you want, and vote for your favorite candidate. Beyond that, which is the first amendment, you are venturing into a gray zone where precedence and common law rule. There is no amendment that says your vendors must continue doing business with you so that you can have the maximum reach for your ideas.
The consensus seems to be that the right to free speech is only guaranteed by the government and the ideal of free speech doesn't need to be upheld by a corporation. The US government doesn't provide DDoS protection or hosting services so the only other alternative is to find a company outside of the US willing to host you.
Because it was founded by a techbro dude who just happened to fall in love with random Russian girl visiting Vegas cough Butina cough, and proceeded to move to Russia where they got married?
The same reason Snowden had to go there.
Because the CEO is married to a Russian?
To play devil's advocate, imagine a chat app for Iranians that faces an attack from their government, and asks an EU-based company to host them...
Sadly in the alternate reality, people believe tomorrow the "Deep State" will install a regime to take over the country of the "true patriots"...
Why does this need to be a news headline on Reuters?
soooo. they are going to host censorship free content in a country accused of censorship itself against a govt which is supposedly most democratic and against censorship and for free speech... phew that was a mouthful...
/s.
edit. DDOS protection against free speech activists aiming to instill the values of free and uncensored speech on the rest of the ungrateful world
It absolutely makes sense to host outside of sphere of influence of people that want to shut you down. China would be a good candidate too (Russia is better, though, since there is 0 chance of good relationships with new admin), unless Parler's uses will become way too involved in China's internal affairs.
You don't find it ironic that a company in a "free" country has to go to a "not free" country to get hosting that won't cancel them for promoting freedom?
For promoting "freedom". I think it's in practice an open question between free speech and propaganda - we really like free speech - 1st amendment, and we really dislike propaganda - Germany, 1930-s - and we really don't know how to deal with this.
the point i am trying to make and this person is defending it while my comment is getting down votes. wow
The most incredible thing about all this is that Parler was built on top of ... WordPress.
Robert Mercer put $10,000,000 into Parler, and they build out a WordPress app. I don't mean to be harsh, and I actually have a special affection for PHP (the first programming language I studied), but that is engineering malpractice.
Also FYI per the New Yorker story in 2018, Robert Mercer is the largest private owner of machine guns in the US. He runs them through the armory Centre Firearms [1].
I've seen no reliable sources make the claim that Parler was built on WordPress. To the best of my knowledge this stems from a misunderstanding, and Parler had a WordPress blog which was compromised, but that is a completely separate system to the main social media site, which is not WordPress.
What does the last bit have to do with the discussion?