Parler is Dead
The destruction of Parler by Google, Apple, and Amazon is a harbinger for what is to come. The sad reality, moreover, is that the tech giants have still used only a fraction of their power. Manipulating search results, throttling up or down various Tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos, even deplatforming, was only the prelude. Now it has been shown that the tech companies are willing to deny hosting services.
As discussed in a useful article published by ZD Net, a website that covers technology business, there are only a handful of hosting and cloud providers that have the capacity to host large websites. Amazon is one of the biggest, and as Parler CEO John Matze has acknowledged, the other big hosting services are reluctant to defy Amazon and accept Parler’s business.
This should surprise nobody. It is not merely the management of tech companies that are determined to silence the American Right. The workforces of these companies are typically more activist than their bosses, and as well these companies are under pressure from powerful leftist nonprofits. Any major provider that accepts business from Parler will be targeted, and they know it. Why bother?
What this means should be clear to every other online property that caters to right-wing content creators. If you get too big, you will need serious technical support from very large service providers, and you are not going to get it. This means there is a ceiling on how much alternative platforms can grow. BitChute and Rumble, which are growing fast, could easily hit this wall.
Moreover, even if alternative platforms innovate with models such as Napster which essentially decentralized the servers onto millions of client machines, there are other ways that big tech can attack them. The ISPs can ban the transmission of specific URLs using automated algorithms. It is even possible that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can create a blacklist of URLs, refusing to recognize them and preventing their ability to operate on the internet. And of course as we’ve already seen, every major financial institution from PayPal to Chase can cancel the accounts of individuals and businesses that traffic in right-wing content.
This week Big Tech served notice to the American Right: We are going to keep you on the run, we are going to limit your audiences, we are going to keep you small and we are going to watch everything you do. We are going to do everything in our power to prevent you from getting your message to millions of people.
Among the many tragic implications of this virtual lockdown is the fact that alternative media has become the only place to find balance. The American news media is awash in propaganda. It is sickening.
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