Fin

 The blog has moved to
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Citizens United, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon

How do you feel about the Citizens United (CU) court case?

Have you realized there is a direct parallel to what happened this weekend with Twitter, Facebook (FB) and Amazon (AWS) ? (For purposes of this post I'll call them all Twitter unless I need to make a distinction)

The CU case was about corporate speech.  CU said they have the right to free speech.  Guess what, so does Twitter. The 3 companies have the perfect right to ban ANYONE they want.  Just like a bakery doesn't have to bake a cake, Twitter doesn't have to host someone (If you feel otherwise, you might want to check your hypocrisy level)

BUT

It is a bit worrisome.
Right now, Twitter and FB are the de facto (but not de jure ) public square.  Do I want to regulate this?  Nope.

What we DO have is an antitrust issue.  Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google (alphabet) etc. are too large and control too much of the internet.  Want an interesting experiment?  Block the IP addresses the belong to Alphabet, and try to use your computer.  Good luck.

I develop software.  Part of developing a solution is looking at risk. Amazon shutting down Parlar made me realize my old boss was right.  The cloud is a BIG risk, and you are beholden to the companies that host your data.  If your cloud host decides one day that they don't like you, or your product, you are DONE (almost all the Cloud APIs are proprietary)

Oh, and if you are really bent about last week, I have a question.  How do you feel about 1983 US Senate bombing by the "Resistance Conspiracy" and the related bombings of Ft McNair and the Washington Navy Yard?  One of the people convicted, Linda Evans was pardoned by Bill Clinton, and now serves on the board of BLM

Disclaimers:
1)I'm a Republican
2)I didn't vote for DJT
3)The rioters we jackasses and worse
4)I never used Twitter except as a data input terminal (via DMs) to a piece of software and as an OAuth provider 

Still has a twitter account

 

Stolen from reddit

 

Wow, I haven't posted in years

 Looks like 8 years since I posted here.  I MAY open a blog on a server I control, no longer trusting services supplied by big tech