Parler, the popular social network among Trump supporters, is coming back to life.
The social network went offline last week after Amazon booted it from its servers for not consistently removing violent posts, a charge Parler denied. But after a week in which Parler executives sued Amazon and predicted that the site would never return, they are predicting it will be up and running again later this month.
This turnaround is partly due to a Russian company.
Parler did business with DDoS-Guard, a Russian company that routes Internet traffic and protects websites from cyber attacks. With your help, visitors to Parler.com now find a basic Web page with the promise of Parler’s chief executive, John Matze, that “our return is inevitable”.
But the use of a Russian company worries some researchers who study the internet and Russia. If Parler directs his web traffic through DDoS-Guard when his full site returns, experts say, Russian law may allow the Russian government to monitor Parler users.
Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, said that Russia has required many internet companies in the country to install technology that powers the government with a copy of much of the data that passes through its servers .
The surveillance system, known as the Operative Investigative Activity System, “basically allows the Russian government to intercept any data on Russian territory and provide that data to the FSB,” said Ms. Polyakova, who studied Russia’s control on the internet. She added that it was not clear whether DDoS-Guard would be subject to such surveillance.
The Russian Embassy in Washington and DDoS-Guard did not respond to requests for comment. Inside an email to CNN, DDoS-Guard said it “does not provide any customer information or any other data to government officials, excluding cases explicitly stated in the law”.
Jeffrey Wernick, Parler’s chief operating officer, said in an interview that the concerns were exaggerated because DDoS-Guard maintained only a temporary Web page for Parler. He said Parler would try to find other companies to operate his full social network.
“Our preference is to have an American company,” he said. “People should not draw conclusions from what this company will be. People extrapolate a lot and with limited information. They get what they want to get done. I call this the dissemination of disinformation. “
But finding willing partners has been a challenge for Parler since the Capitol rebellion on January 6.
After supporters of President Trump invaded the Capitol, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump from their services. This sent a flood of new people to Parler, exceeding 15 million users. So Apple and Google removed Parler’s app from their app stores and Amazon stopped hosting Parler’s website on their servers because, according to them, Parler was not consistently removing violent messages. In addition to denying these allegations, Parler accused the companies of collusion.
Since then, other companies have rejected Parler. Matze said in a lawsuit on Monday that “at least six extremely large potential providers” refused to accept Parler’s business because they feared cyber attacks or believed that Parler hosted incitements to violence.
“Parler is an internet company that can’t get online,” Parler’s lawyer, David Groesbeck, said in a separate lawsuit on Monday. “And the longer Parler is dead, the more difficult it will be to resurrect.”
Still, in statements to the press, Parler executives are predicting a full return by the end of January. Wernick did not say how Parler would do this, but he attributed the trust to a “Herculean effort” by his team.
“We are not sleeping,” he said. “We work day and night, every day. There is no weekend for us. “
For Parler, the ideal solution would be to return to Amazon’s servers. The network accused Amazon of violating antitrust law and asked a federal judge to force it to host Parler. After a hearing last week, companies now await a decision.
Many observers and online journalists have speculated that Parler will eventually be hosted by Epik, a company that supported other sites rejected by technology companies, including Gab, another popular social network in right-wing circles.
But Robert Davis, Epik’s senior vice president, said in an interview that Epik only helped to register Parler’s domain name, a basic function of the Internet. Although Epik would like to help, he said, Parler’s needs are very great.
“I expected Parler to be an incredible force for good in the future,” he said. “I could easily see them reach 100 million members or more in 2021 alone.”
Davis said he believed Parler was trying to build his own infrastructure. On Monday, Mr. Matze seemed to support this idea in an interview on Fox News, saying, “We really need to build our own infrastructure and our own technology.”
In a lawsuit on the same day, Mr. Matze said that Parler did not have “the technical and security experience to host the Parler environment on his own”, adding, “Nor is it feasible for Parler to do that”.
He said the computers and other equipment needed to host Parler’s website would cost more than $ 6 million and take weeks to arrive. “Simply put, it wouldn’t be possible for Parler itself to acquire the necessary servers and related security infrastructure within a commercially reasonable timeframe,” he said.
Dave Temkin, an engineer who helped lead the Netflix internet infrastructure team until last week, said he did not believe Parler would return soon, given the difficulty of creating his own infrastructure and the reluctance of other companies to help.
He said that even if Parler built his own data center in the United States, it would be necessary to persuade an internet provider like Verizon or AT&T to install fiber optic cables to connect him to the wider internet.
“It’s like you have a car with no roads,” he said.