Hours after it went out of business on Monday, Parler, the budding social media company, filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Amazon of violating antitrust law and requesting a temporary restraining order to prevent the tech giant from blocking access to cloud computing services.
I told Amazon Parler over the weekend It will shut down the service because the “steady increase in violent content” on the site has shown that the company does not have a reliable process to prevent it from violating Amazon’s Terms of Service. Amazon said it will ensure that Parler’s data is preserved so it can move to a new hosting provider.
Millions of people turned to Parler after Twitter and Facebook blocked President Trump following riots at the Capitol building last week. Both Apple and Google kicked Parler out of their app stores over the weekend, although users who had already downloaded the app could still use it. But the app relied on Amazon’s cloud computing technology to work.
Parler’s complaint was dated Sunday, before Amazon discontinued Parler. But the lawsuit was not brought to court until Monday.
In the lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Western District in Washington, Parler accuses Amazon of terminating his account, not just suspending it – and said he should have received 30 days’ notice. It also argued that Amazon violated antitrust law by conspiring with Twitter, one of Amazon’s major customers, to start Parler just as she was gaining wider traction. It said it has 12 million users and expects to add millions more this week given its growth in the past few days.
Parler did not provide direct evidence showing that Amazon and Twitter coordinated the response. Instead, he referred to a press release in December that announced a multi-year strategic partnership between Amazon and Twitter, and pointed to the special Twitter challenges that govern its content.
Parler said losing Amazon services would be a “death knell,” although other platforms popular with far-right and conspiracy theorists, such as gave And the 8chan, I managed to recover after the hosting providers terminated.
David J. Groesbeek, a sole practitioner of intellectual property attorney in Olympia, Washington, filed a lawsuit with Parler. Amazon did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
