Amazon “will kill Parler’s business – at the moment it will skyrocket,” the complaint reads.
Background: Amazon Web Services discontinued service to Parler just before midnight Pacific time Sunday, saying the microblogging platform violates Amazon’s terms of service by not doing enough to combat death threats and other public safety risks. According to IT analytics firm Canalys, AWS is the largest cloud provider worldwide, accounting for about 32 percent of the market.
Google and Apple also kicked Parler’s app out of their respective app stores over the weekend, on similar grounds.
Parler has become a popular alternative to Twitter and Facebook, as the companies have downplayed the content posted by President Donald Trump and others. Last year, about 10 million people downloaded Parler, according to mobile app analytics company Sensor Tower, with about 80 percent of those in the United States. By contrast, Twitter had about 68.7 million U.S. users in October and Facebook about 220 million last year, according to analytics firm Statista.
Parler did not give an exact number of users in the complaint, but said its use “accelerated” in 2021 with a 355 percent increase in U.S. downloads Friday. Efforts to find an alternative web hosting service have ‘gone through’, the company said, and there is a danger of losing users the longer the service is gone.
“If Parler is not available, people will go to alternatives, or perhaps return to Twitter or Facebook,” the complaint reads. “And once users start using another platform, they may not return to Parler when it’s online again.”