Parler Sues Amazon for Withdrawing Support After U.S. Capitol Riot
Sam Shead, CNBC, January 12, 2021
Social network Parler is suing Amazon for pulling its cloud computing support in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.
Popular with conservatives and supporters of President Donald Trump, Parler was reliant on the cloud computing services provided by AWS. However, AWS withdrew its support this week after concluding that posts on Parler “clearly encourage and incite violence.”
In a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, Parler accused Amazon Web Services of breaking antitrust laws.
“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus,” the lawsuit said. “It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.”
It continues: “This emergency suit seeks a Temporary Restraining Order against defendant Amazon Web Services to prevent it from shutting down Parler’s account. Doing so is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support. It will kill Parler’s business — at the very time it is set to skyrocket.”
An AWS spokesperson told CNBC there’s no merit to the claims, while Parler did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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In the lawsuit, Parler’s lawyers question why AWS isn’t removing support for Twitter, which is also an AWS customer.
AWS “stated the reason for the suspension was that AWS was not confident Parler could properly police its platform regarding content that encourages or incites violence against others,” the lawsuit said. “However, (on) Friday night one of the top trending tweets on Twitter was ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ But AWS has no plans nor has it made any threats to suspend Twitter’s account.”
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John Matze, founder and CEO of Parler, condemned the tech giants’ moves. {snip}
Matze said Monday that the Parler app will be down “longer than expected” because other cloud hosting companies do not want to work with Parler in light of the press statements issued by Amazon, Google and Apple.
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