In more “normal” times, this would be encouraging. What Amazon did was clear violation of Antitrust and probably at least a dozen US laws on torturous business interference, breach of contract, monopolistic behavior, etc.
In today’s political climate? WHO KNOWS if this will even go anywhere or be heard by a court of law. Let’s hope so, cuz this CANNOT STAND.
Not to defend Amazon, but this is laughable. Amazon's AWS service is a hosted solution provider. There's got to be 1,000 of them out there. The largest players include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and others. Amazon AWS doesn't even have half the market, let alone a monopoly, and there's no evidence whatsoever of collusion for price fixing or anything else between those major players.
To say nothing of the fact that what they effectively are is a rented compute and storage company. And when you break down what the "cloud providers" do, you add Rackspace, NTT America, Equinix, RagingWire, and 1,000 other players to the market. There isn't one platform that everyone must use. There are literally over 1,000 depending on the specific mix of features and integration and pricing and so on that you're after. Antitrust? What trust? Have a bad relationship with Amazon AWS? Go somewhere else. That's called capitalism.
"probably at least a dozen US laws on torturous business interference, breach of contract, monopolistic behavior, etc."
Zero chance of success. Amazon could put a first year law student on this case and it'd be a slam dunk. Have you ever read their ToS? It's about 6 miles long and gives them dozens of opportunities to to use to terminate your service at any time. Unless Parler somehow got service without agreeing to the Terms of Service (and they didn't), they're easily in violation a dozen different ways because pretty much anyone can be at Amazon's sole discretion. If you want to use their platform, that's the agreement you make. Otherwise, go elsewhere. There's literally 1,000 other providers in the marketplace. Monopolistic behavior? That would require anything remotely resembling a monopoly. And depending on how you want to slice up the market (whether you want to go with the insanely narrow definition of "cloud platform providers"), the worst you can claim is that Amazon AWS controls less than half the market. And that market share has been declining steadily as Microsoft Azure and others become bigger players.
That just isn't a monopoly. Like it or not, there's no case here. If the case survives an immediate dismissal, I'd be utterly shocked. But I won't be shocked. It's going nowhere.