re: #468 Eventual Carrion

That’s what I keep saying. They can buy servers, hire staff, get a T5 line put in. Bake their own fucking cake.

also from todays electoral-vote.com

Amazon sent a message to Parler’s CEO John Matze listing nearly 100 violations of Amazon’s terms and conditions, largely focusing on how Parler spreads hate and allows “tweets” (parles? bon mots?) encouraging violence. For example, L. Lin Wood, a lawyer who sued to overturn Trump’s election loss, recently posted: “Get the firing squad ready. Pence goes FIRST.” Amazon is a private company and can pretty much decide on its own that it doesn’t want Parler as a customer. Getting a court to force Amazon to take a customer that Amazon says has repeatedly violated Amazon’s stated policies would be next to impossible, even if Amazon weren’t the second biggest company on the Fortune 500 list (Walmart is #1). It’s not going to happen.

Amazon isn’t the only company that rents servers, but it is the biggest. Parler is now frantically looking for new hosting capacity. If it can’t find it, the company is toast. Microsoft also runs huge server farms but there is no way that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (an immigrant from India) is going to help Parler spew its xenophobia, racism, and hate. The third big player in the hosting market is Google, but Google has already made it clear what it thinks of Parler by removing its app from the Android store. There are plenty of other hosting companies, but Parler will need a fairly large one and it could be tricky to find one that is willing to accept the blowback that it will get if it takes on Parler. Maybe Matze can ask Vladimir Putin if he knows of any Russian hosting companies he can recommend.

Trump himself has toyed with setting up his own microblogging service, to compete with Twitter and Parler. But to do so, he will also need to rent a lot of servers. In addition to the problem of most big companies not willing to touch him with a 10-foot pole, he has the extra problem of everyone’s knowing that he doesn’t pay his bills. Any company that is willing to do business with him is probably going to demand the first year’s rent for the servers paid in full in advance before turning them on. That would cost millions of dollars Trump doesn’t have. As far as we know, Parler pays its bills on time (with Rebekah Mercer’s money), and if it has trouble finding a hosting company, it will be that much harder for Trump given both the content issues and his reputation for stiffing his vendors. While it is unlikely Trump will be totally muzzled, getting the word out will be a lot more dificult going forward. Maybe the President should look into smoke signals or skywriting. Don’t need a server for those. (V)