Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Parler may never recover if he is banned by Amazon and a number of other technology companies, CEO John Matze said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday.
“I’m an optimist,” he said at one point in the conversation. “It may take days, it may take weeks, but Parler will return and when we do, we will be stronger.”
But at another point in the conversation, he admits: ‘It can never be. We do not know yet. ‘
Over the weekend, Google and Apple both removed Parler from their app stores. Shortly thereafter, Amazon Parler kicked off Amazon Web Services, which hosted the site. And it wasn’t just Amazon. “Every seller, from texting services to email providers to our attorneys, has dropped us all,” Matze said in a Sunday interview on Fox News. Parler has been offline ever since.
Technology companies were worried because Parler had become a gathering place for the kind of right-wing extremists who planned the violent attack on the American Capitol last week. Amazon says Parler has been warning for months about violent content being offered on the site – for example, content that called for “the rape, torture and assassination of said public officials and private citizens.”
After Amazon divested Parler from AWS, Parler sued Amazon. Parler claims the removal was part of a conspiracy against competition to bolster Twitter’s dominance. But as Amazon noted in its response, Amazon does not offer the Twitter feed, and the two companies do not communicate about Parler.
Since Parler provides multiple services at the same time, it can take Parler’s engineers to rebuild the service with different vendors. Even if they can do it, they will probably be thwarted by the bans on Apple and Google because they have no easy way to distribute their mobile app to users.