The Trouble With Parler
At what point of market dominance can you no longer decide what clients you can accept? Typically, life-saving services provided by an oligopoly can not fully choose its clients, like insurance companies and banks. But what about Internet Services Providers, network backbones, dominant cloud players and appstores? The exclusion of Parler from Appstore, Google Play and Amazon Web Services raises some interesting questions.
I think we need to discuss when certain Internet necessities reaches a point of an obligation to contract. In practice, it has turned out that freedom of expression/speech has been sacrificed on the altar of business. We have all seen the pictures from the storming of the Capitol. That can never be defended. But should an app that have potentially carried messages regarding this be banned from necessary services.
From a free market perspective, every actor has a right to deal or not deal with any operator in the marketplace. However, does that hold true if you can not enter the marketplace at all without such counter-parties?
An insurance company or a bank may not deny you insurance or services because you are cheering on the awful football team AIK. This is because the insurance company has a obligation to contract. The obligation to contract applies to those whom, in a limited market, provide goods and services that it is difficult to do without. However, an internet operator, Amazon or Apple can stop your activity because you are cheering on AIK and justify it with the fact that it is not commercially right to house AIK supporters in its network.
There is a Swedish website called Flashback. It is a very little moderated Reddit-style forum that has been around for many decades. Flashback publishes interesting stuff but also pretty awful things. Everyone can have a say in Flashback. Pedophiles, Nazis, anti-Nazis, Palestinians, Israelis, hackers, crackers, internet pornographers, freedom of speech fighters, censorship activists, reviewers of escorts, gossipers on crimes, companies, celebrities and so on. It all leads to an aggregated cesspool of content that I personally find to be too wild for my taste. Others find the content outrageous and that it should be banned. However, Flashback’s activities have not been prohibited by a judgment or an interim decision issued by a court.
Back in the fall of 2000, Flashback suffered severe problems finding a Swedish company that wanted to host its website. Flashback was been terminated by KPN Qwest and Worldcom and subsequently by Tele1 and Telebudget. In the Worldcom case, it was difficult for outsiders to know exactly what happened. One party claims that there was no agreement between the parties, while the other party (Flashback) claimed the opposite. There is certainly some kind of agreement, at least an oral one, otherwise Flashback would hardly have gained access from the other party in the first stage.
In the case of Telebudget, Telebudget wanted to continue to house Flashback, but its supplier Tele1 Europe would shut down Telebudget if the company has Flashback as a customer.
Pelle Hjortbladh, CEO of Tele1 Europe, defended in Computer Sweden its decision to threaten Telebudget with suspension based on a business call. Several Tele1 Europe customers made allegations and wanted the company to terminate Telebudget as a customer, Hjortbladh claimed.
Although it may seem natural to choose your own business partner, this is hardly the case for those who provide limited utility in an oligopolistic situation. Axelsson could at the time move his business abroad, but given that the large network providers are global and extremely dominant, it is not even certain that it will lead to a problem-free existence for him.
The actions of Internet service providers today could only be interpreted as meaning that they want to make a selection of customers because of the content that these customers want to distribute in the networks. However, such a selection leads in the long run to the internet operator must be considered to take responsibility for the content that is de facto distributed in its network. I do not think the Internet operator wants such a responsibility, given that it requires a preview (censorship) of all data transported in the network.
Now on to Parler. It has been blocked by Appstore, Google Play and AWS. Of course, it could build an Appstore of its own. It could build its own Rackspace. It could even build its own Internet. But should it have to? We are talking duopoly here, not even oligopoly, when it comes to the appstores. You could build a webonly version of Parler, but does that make sense? Do we really want Tim, Sundar and Jeff to decide whom can express their views on the Internet? Do they even want that themselves? At some point the market dominance and the lack of alternatives creates a situation where the actors in the market lose their respective freedom to contract. I am not sure we are there, but this needs to be investigated thoroughly.
Regarding the storming of the Capitolium, many of the people doing it are already arrested and could face up to 5–10 years in prison. Because there are laws, both regulating speech and the storming of sensitive public buildings. Sometimes, even manufacturers of tools get regulated and prosecuted, for example for letting hate speech or incitement of violence to be continuously published. There are some checks and balances.
Writing this, the Internet is blocked in Uganda. The losing opposition from this week’s election can’t voice its protests online. Sounds like totalitarianism, doesn’t it?
The Trouble With Parler is that it’s dead.
The German democratic socialist Rosa Luxemberg said it the best:
“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden
Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
Mikael Pawlo
