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Parler may never recover from being banned by Amazon and a number of other technology companies, CEO John Matze told Reuters in an interview 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 acknowledged, “It may never be. We don’t know yet.”
Over the weekend, Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores. Shortly thereafter, Amazon expelled Parler from Amazon Web Services, which hosted the site. And it wasn’t just Amazon. “All the providers, from text messaging services to email providers and our lawyers, have abandoned us,” Matze said in a Sunday interview with Fox News. Parler has been offline since then.
Technology companies were concerned that Parler had become a meeting place for the kind of right-wing extremists who planned last week’s violent attack on the United States Capitol. Amazon says it has warned Parler for months about violent content hosted on the site – for example, content that called for “rape, torture and murder of appointed public officials and private citizens”.
After Amazon pulled Parler off AWS, Parler sued Amazon. Parler says the fall was part of an anti-competitive conspiracy to strengthen Twitter’s dominance. But, as Amazon pointed out in its response, Amazon does not host the Twitter feed and the two companies have not communicated anything about Parler.
With multiple services abandoning Parler simultaneously, it can take a while for Parler engineers to rebuild the service using different vendors. Even if they can manage this, they are likely to be hampered by Apple and Google’s prohibitions, since they will not have an easy way to distribute their mobile apps to users.