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Comment by vfclists | Hacker News Reader

Your home is not infrastructure. Internet service, banking and online payments are infrastructure just like water, gas and electricity and companies shouldn't have the right to cut you off on ideological grounds or because your spew out so called hate speech.

Note I said internet service not a subscription to a social media service. Your internet provider may decline to provide you with email, hell the may even decline you to provide with you with DNS, but they sure as well can't refuse to route your packets or accept incoming connections.

Apple and Google were within their rights to cut off access to the App store, but Amazon were in the wrong because they are an infrastructure company. At the very least they were obliged to allow Parler enough time to transfer to new providers.

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> gas and electricity and companies shouldn't have the right to cut you off on ideological grounds or because your spew out so called hate speech

All of us here in the US are entitled and reserve the right to do business with whom we want as long as it doesn't violate discrimination laws, which focus on race, religion and things like that - not opinion about whether there are lizard people ruling the government or that an election was "stolen" because a few people made up some good stories about it but there is no actual proof that can be viewed in person...at all.

Wrong again. Infrastructure for the most part depends on govt licensing and lends it self to monopolies or oligopolies.

When those oligopolies act in concert or along the same ideological lines what options do you have?

E.g. the authorities can seize cash from you as has happened to store owners who went to deposit it at the bank. If every bank refuses to serve you which you claim to be their right, then why do you have laws which to criminalize cash holdings if that forces you to withdraw your cash from them and hold it in the street or at your home?

One cannot criminalize large cash holdings arising from cash payments which is okay with many people while at the same time giving banks the right to deny service.

There is one electric company that serves my apartment. If I get cut off, I don’t get electricity.

On the other hand, there are a thousand different cloud providers; surely at least one would have taken Parler on as a customer. And even failing that, it’s much easier for Parler to run their own servers than it is for me to run my own power plant.

Yes but they can only cut if you off for non payment, they can't cut you of for your political views. They can't even cut you off if you use your electricity to commit crimes.

Yes, because they’re a regulated monopoly. There are quite literally zero other ways to make electricity come out of my wall sockets. That’s not the case with AWS.

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