This post is a cautionary tale for those organizations that rely on third-party hosting services for their functionality, discovery in the marketplace, logistics and fulfillment, payments processing, or other critical services.
Any organization that is dependent on a third-party hosting service assumes the risk of de-platforming that increases exponentially with the organization’s size, profitability, competitiveness, or public political profile, which may generate adverse regulatory, media, or public scrutiny for the third-party host.
The risk is greatly amplified if the third-party hosting service is a public company, experiencing financial difficulties, uses proprietary hardware, proprietary software, proprietary service, and storage protocols, is willing to sacrifice any customer for its beneficial gain, or is attempting to ward off or delay adverse governmental regulations.
The risk is also magnified when the technology company is controlled by a high-profile public person who seeks public attention and approval.
A contemporary example
According to John Matze, co-founder of one of the fastest-growing social media platforms and an alternative to Twitter, the company will be de-platformed by the technology services host, Amazon.
“Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight, Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.”
Whether or not Parler can survive this attempt at de-platforming is unknown. As is the fate of their finances, staff, and future viability.
Unfortunately, many third-party service providers demand that organizations sign a unilateral one-sided contract, allowing them to take adverse actions against the organization without legal or financial consequences.
Whether or not Parler can bring a legal action based on anti-trust, anti-competitive, tortuous business interference, or even defamation. Likewise, whether or not Parler’s audience is enough to deter Amazon from taking precipitous action is unknown.
Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?