Court Rejects Parler’s Demand that Amazon Host Its Services -

"Parler claimed (1) antitrust violations, (2) breach of contract, and (3) tortious interference."

Why this is important: Parler has tested the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad press.” After its platform was used by insurrectionists attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, public pressure built against the defiantly “free speech” company until Amazon invoked its Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") to remove it from its AW3 servers. Parler sued, seeking a temporary restraining order ("TRO") to restore its access to the AW3 servers. But a federal court recently made short work for those claims, denying the motion for TRO and expressing skepticism that Parler could prevail on the merits. The problems for Parler were two-fold. Its antitrust claim, which was based on a conspiracy between AW3 and Twitter to harm its business, failed to identity any facts supporting that theory. And, its other claims struggled against the discretion given to Amazon under the AUP in the parties’ contract. Some commentators, even those without any particular sympathy to Parler, have expressed concern about the ability of dominant web hosting companies like Amazon to decide what they will and will not host. But as Professor Goldman notes in his own analysis, Parler has only itself to blame: it set out to create a platform that would be a lightning rod for controversy without implementing any content moderation capabilities and without any redundancy or backup plan.