One has to wonder if Big Tech realizes that they essentially validate any argument for antitrust intervention. Too bad it has taken so long to get to that point, but perhaps Parler’s trial will be the necessary catalyst.
And it sure looks like Parler has a pretty good thing here:
Parler, the alternative social media platform favored by the far right, sued Amazon on Monday in response to its outage for antitrust violations, breach of contract, and disruption of the company’s business relationships with users.
The complaint asks a federal court for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Amazon (AMZN) and calls Amazon Web Services’ decision a “death knell” for Parler.
“Without AWS, Parler is ready because there is no way to go online,” the complaint said. “And a delay in awarding this TRO by even one day could ring Parler’s death knell if President Trump and others move to other platforms.”
Parler’s lawsuit alleges that Amazon has falsely tried to restrict competition by removing a player from the market.
Second look for conservatives net neutrality? To answer that question, read Jazz’s post yesterday about the gatekeepers’ attack on Parler. It now affects almost every Big Tech organization except Facebook, and that’s only because Facebook doesn’t have gatekeeper status for Parler. Both Google and Apple demanded content moderation from Parler to host the app in their stores, and that was before Amazon closed them due to the same problem.
In any other industry and context, that would look a lot like … monopolistic behavior and collusion. It should immediate government action with respect to the Sherman Act, either with the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice, to determine whether such collusion has occurred. More importantly, it demonstrates the dangers of consolidation in any industry, but perhaps especially in the technology and communications industry.
ACLU attorney Ben Wizner warns that these decisions have consequences, even if they are popular right now. This goes beyond the Twitter purge involving Donald Trump and his supporters, which the ACLU had already criticized for delving deeper into the issues of free speech and other civil liberties:
Here’s what ACLU attorney Ben Wizner fully told me about Parler going dark because of AWS. pic.twitter.com/aIELab0kze
– Davey Alba (@daveyalba) January 11, 2021
Pay close attention to the reference to “neutrality principles”. The Trump administration has waived net neutrality rules at the start of their tenure, which has been applauded by conservatives. If those are recalculated to put some kind of brake on this kind of deplatforming – or even sold as such by the Biden administration – conservatives could encourage their re-imposition.
The real problem here is the let it go approach to consolidation in recent decades, and the reluctance to understand what that means in political power. I argued for years about this blind spot on the right and what it would ultimately mean for access and influence. Parler is the canary in the coal mine – and a harbinger of things to come unless we get assertive about consolidation and start dismantling the mega-corporations.