Comment by sparkling
5 years ago
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
This is inaccurate. A $50K a month AdWords spend does not get meaningful support.
I think I've seen meaningful support for this level of AdWords spend.
A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.
Utterly untrue. AWS is not a 'systematic risk', that's absolutely ridiculous and I can't even begin to address that statement.
The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.
AWS has a terms of service. They'd warned Parler for months about their lack of moderation [0]
"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""
" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]
Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.
AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.
People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly. They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama. Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
[1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-ov...
At least the Parler incident seems foreseeable, if you are hosting content that could bring down the hammer onto the giant corporations that you use to host the content, these corporations will cut you loose to protect themselves. Parler leadership must have know they were in hot water as soon as the amateur coup happened.
The Google thing is such an unforced error because despite this same story happening time and time again, google still doesn't have any ways for (important) customers/partners to reach them if things go wrong. In this case it's especially funny because Google Stadia needs Terraria way more than the other way around. (Terraria sold 30 million copies and is available basically every platform except Stadia, Google Stadia is a struggling new platform that keeps failing to incentivize developers to develop for the platform)
> The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.
AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.
Being an alt-right/neo-nazi content host is a systematic risk. Nothing particularly shocking about that. Doesn't have much to do with AWS, tbh.
Can't speak for Google, but I've gotten great phone support from AWS while spending less than $100 a month.