Parler CEO Says Service Dropped By “Every Vendor” And Could End His Business

Deadline ^ | 1/10/2021 | Bruce Harling

[Onthebrink]

Parler CEO Mark Matze said today that his company have been dropped by virtually all of their business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements with the social media service.

“Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” Matze said today on Fox News.

Matze conceded that the bans could put the company out of business while raising free speech issues, calling it “an assault on everybody.”

“They all work together to make sure at the same time we would lose access to not only our apps, but they’re actually shutting all of our servers off tonight, off the internet,” Matze said. “They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”

[WildHighlander57]

freeagle wrote:

“They have the donor email lists. Hopefully this helps if they’re shut down.”

signup emails can be decades old & out of business; then what?

[Amish with an attitude]

Never did Facebook or Twitter, but did cancel Amazon today after years of non-use just to send a message.

[Reverend Wright]

“Basically the TechTyrants are saying that if Parler allows one person — Donald Trump — to join the service, the entire service should be shut down.

I see a major lawsuit in that.”

John roberts and the Supremes will get right on it. Maybe he will declare it a tax/s

[A Conservative Future]

FreeRepublic’s days are numbered.

Very unlikely, for a few reasons:

• Free Republic does not have shareholders

Apple, Amazon, and Google did not drop Parler because Parler is conservative. They dropped Parler because Parler is full of people explicitly calling for violence against people in government, and they refused to moderate that content. These publicly held companies are legally obligated to protect shareholder value and limit corporate liability, and can be sued by their shareholders if they do not. Parler's refusal to moderate their content was going to lead to lost revenue for Apple (hardware, apps), Amazon (AWS, ads), and Google (ads). Allowing Parler to remain on their platforms would be cut and dry fiduciary irresponsibility, and class action would result in short order. This problem only gets worse if Section 230 is repealed (see below).

• Free Republic moderates its user-generated content

Anyone who was reading Free Republic during the previous administration will remember that Free Republic's staff will, from time to time, remind people that threatening to kill the President is illegal and draws the scrutiny of the Secret Service. Additionally, posts which violate Free Republic's terms of service (which are there to protect the site from being taken down by litigious liberals) are quickly deleted. Parler did not enforce its own stated terms of service, and when asked to do so by Apple as a condition of their placement in the App Store, they actively refused to do so.

• Free Republic is not deployed in the cloud

As part of Free Republic's independence, they do not use cloud computing or (I think?) traditional web hosting. I'm pretty sure they own the hardware that the site runs on, and the only services they consume are physical datacenter hosting and ISP connectivity. Gab, as I understand it, also owns their own hardware, which is why they are still online (albeit having to rapidly expand their hardware to accommodate the influx of Twitter and Parler refugees). Connectivity and hosting are much lower level services, and companies who provide them are clearly protected by Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. If you get rid of Section 230, every internet entity that allows commentary, and every entity who hosts them, will become liable for the content generated by their users. If you think there's a purge going on now, repeal Section 230 and watch how fast the sites disappear.

• Free Republic's staff is politically homogeneous

Twitter eventually began suspending conservatives who breached their terms of service repeatedly not because they were told to do so by the government, but because a very significant percentage of their employees threatened to quit if they didn't. This is obviously not going to be a problem for Free Republic or Gab, both of which were founded by and for conservatives, and are staffed by people with conservative beliefs.

This is about corporate entities protecting themselves from liability. This is very similar to what happened with Fox News, Newsmax, and Dominion. Particularly in the case of Fox, the most popular cable news channel in the country who undoubtedly retain some of the best lawyers in the country, were compelled on a dime to acknowledge that they had been peddling fantasies and falsehoods, to the point of rebutting their own reporting and opinion content to protect the company from liability.

Parler didn't get censored, nor did anyone's First Amendment rights get infringed. Both of those things require action by the government, which did not occur here. We are still absolutely free to engage in political speech, as demonstrated by Free Republic, Fox News, Gab, Newsmax, etc. This is about market forces - the invisible hand of market capitalism - not government power. "Let the market decide" has been our mantra for decades; "government should not be picking winners and losers", etc. That's what is happening here: Parler was bad for Amazon, Apple, and Google's bottom line. You may not like it, but that's how business is done in America. Anything else would be, well, communism, and I for one would much rather have the market solve this problem, as opposed to the heavy, intrusive hand of the federal government.

Parler got lazy and complacent, gorging itself on short term success and ignoring the future. It's not surprising that they went down like this. Free Republic and Gab are, and remain, vigilant, and that vigilance is being rewarded with success.

Please consider donating to the Q1 2021 Freepathon today! Now more than ever we need to keep Free Republic financially independent!

[LibertarianLiz]

Two days? Amazon gave Parler 24 hours

Yes, he did and he also said that 24 hours was impossible for the amount of data he would have to move.

[WHBates]

Yes, who is going to prosecute.

[Swiffer_Ralf]

There are young it guys that can run rings round the gear now, as there were when the old guys now retiring were like.

And a great many of them are Patriots, it’s why they don’t get snapped up by the woke corporations.

Employ Patriots, and get HR firms back to doing ONLY wages.

[A Conservative Future]

What good is an email list if you cannot buy email service? The CEO of Parler wrote "Every vendor from text message services to email providers..."

Stand up your own SMTP services, like Free Republic and Gab do?

The more I hear from the Parler team, the less respect I have for them. They keep whining about being victims and how they expect to have the work done for them. Meanwhile, Gab is pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and stepping up to support the conservative community at-large, without whining about witch hunts or "muh censorship".

[Celerity]

I actually border on it. I share my bandwidth with municipal and 911 services parallel to Level 3.

I also have direct mm7 and mm4 telco level for sms/MMS with 30k+ simultaneous messages throughout.

Yes. I can help parler out. And I won’t lose any clients. And I own everything so I don’t care.

[WildHighlander57]

pilgrim wrote:

“>>🚨PLEASE SHARE🚨
Please do not abandon Parler. We are NOT going anywhere. We may have a temporary disruption in service now that monopolist Amazon has attacked us, but it’ll be brief and we have a backup plan<<

Seems to know something.”

Interesting.

This does not line up with what the Deadline artice is saying, that the vendors (text, email, lawyers) have dumped Parler agreements.

Somebody’s putting out disinfo, and it might be the Deadline site.

[WHBates]

Which is why AWS should have been avoided at all cost. In this case there is obvious a criminal conspiracy going on that the FTC should take up.

[Campion]

The hosting company will say “Good bye — you have two days to clear out.” and then what?

Not as bad as you might think. You find another hosting company, set stuff up, get your DNS changed, and push the button. Or, you can buy some hardware, get an account with a datacenter, and run on your own hardware instead of stuff you lease from the hosting company.

Amazon is different. They have a whole lot of goodies you can build around to make large-scale systems; much of it is stuff they built to run Amazon's sales operation. If you build your system to depend on those things, then you have a lot of work to do (months, maybe years) to disentangle it from those Amazon-proprietary systems and get it to work somewhere else. If you *don't* build your system to depend on those things, of course it takes longer to build, will be more expensive to build, and may be more expensive to run.

I thought the CEO of Parler said that their system was architected not to depend on AWS-specific services, but maybe he was mistaken ... ?

[Campion]

The more I hear from the Parler team, the less respect I have for them. They keep whining about being victims and how they expect to have the work done for them.

This. An "email service" is just a convenience. If you have an Internet connection, standing up something to route email is not that hard.

[SE Mom]

Rhat was posted 5 hours ago- maybe he has different information?

Lawyers jumping ship- slimy.

[eartick]

Their own phones. If you have any info on this I would love to have it. I will start looking but if you have info please send

[LuxAerterna]

How much longer will Free Republic be around?

[RedStateRocker]

There is nothing in the constitution about free speech.

The Constitution says that Congress shall not make any laws prohibiting speech. If it’s not the government shutting you down, you have no legal protection.

Just as there is no right to “protest”. There is a right to assemble peacefully for the redress of grievances.

[setter]

“I have no doubt they are going to regret dabbling so overtly in politics. Not that I am suggesting anything...”

In my area where I grew up union teamasters would shoot at scab coal truck drivers with high powered scoped rifles from wooded hillsides...None were caught I can recall....not that I am suggesting anything.....

[A Conservative Future]

Section 230. Now.

Repealing Section 230 would be an unmitigated disaster for the conservative internet. Section 230 is absolutely crucial to the continued existence of Free Republic, Gab, and other independent conservative voices. The "purge" that everyone is afraid of will actually happen if Section 230 is repealed; no one will be willing to risk hosting conservative content anymore for fear of being sued for "libel" or being liable for "inciting violence". Think about how badly the courts have treated conservatives lately - without the safe harbor provision of Section 230, they will be positively gleeful at the prospect of punishing companies for having the nerve to host conservative content.

[Onthebrink]

You have to wonder if other conservative platforms will be targeted fur Webhosting disconnects.