Wanted to branch this discussion off of the whole Parler-being-dropped-by-AWS thing that largely got buried in the Insurrection 2021 thread.
For context: Alt-right social media site Parler was used by white supremacists and other right-wing extremists to plan and execute (and later, self-incriminate over) the January 6 storming of the US Capitol. This righteously pissed off most of America, and cloud hosting megagiant Amazon Web Services kicked Parler off of its services for failing to so much as lift a finger to discourage its users from fomenting terrorist plots in the open.
This is basically an Internet death sentence. As @CLWheeljack noted in the aforementioned thread, the technical realities of distributed cloud architecture for a modern consumer-scale web app like Parler make it basically impossible to migrate off of your cloud provider no matter how “platform agnostic” your engineers tell you they’ve made things. Even world-class engineers can’t really do that without more or less rebuilding the whole thing, and Parler for some reason does not seem to have attracted world-class engineering talent.
So.
Today I came across (from that same mailing list, not shockingly) an article by a super-smart lady about how Internet network peerage works on a contractual level and effectively gives the tier-1 backbone providers effective control over which bits get passed around the tubes.
Even extremely large tech companies that have their own data centers, like Facebook and Apple, are ultimately beholden to ISPs. (Google is something of an odd case because in addition to owning their own data centers, they are one of the largest global network operators. Google owns extensive fiber routes and peers with Tier 1 ISPs as an equal.) And even though AWS has, to some degree, a network of its own, it is effectively a Tier 2 ISP, making it beholden to the AUPs of its upstream. Other cloud providers are typically mostly or fully transit-dependent, and are thus entirely beholden to their upstream.
In short: Everyone who hosts content companies, and the content companies themselves, is essentially trapped, by the chain of AUP obligations, to policing content to ensure that it is not illegal, harassing, or otherwise seen as commercially problematic.
She then goes on to explain how persona non grata like Parler are relegated to primarily Russian providers to actually host their applications, which is of course fraught with any number of additional issues.
The upshot of all this is that there exists a de facto standard of behavior, as enforced by these cascading contract terms that come down from the backbone providers, the contravention of which get you more or less an Internet death sentence.
What I want to explore is this: Is this ideal? Should more formal multilateral agreements between polities take a more active role in what is and isn’t allowed to be on the (for lack of a better term) “public” Internet? Is this sort of organically grown-and-agreed-upon set of behavioral standards actually a better situation than getting the politicians involved?
From the article:
It’s an interesting result of what happens when businesses police themselves. Even without formal industry-association “rules” or regulatory obligations, a fairly ironclad order can emerge that exerts extremely effective downstream pressure (as we saw in the cases of 8Chan and the Daily Stormer back in 2019).
I don’t have a clear answer to this. Personally I tend toward practical technocratic solutions to societal problems like this, and I think I am coming down for the moment on “not broke, don’t fix” in the sense that I have little faith that political action would actually result in better outcomes. Not that I don’t love clicking through cookie warnings thanks to the loving oversight and gentle guiding hand of the wise elders at the EU.