Parler's Laughably Bad Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon

As you may have heard, over the weekend Amazon removed Parler from its AWS cloud hosting services, causing the website to shut down. I've been working on a longer piece about all of this, but in the meantime, I did want to write about the laughably bad antitrust lawsuit that Parler filed against Amazon in response. Notably, this came just days after Parler's CEO claims that his own lawyers quit (would these be the same "lawyers" who stupidly advised that the company doesn't need Section 230?). Instead, they found a small time independent practitioner who doesn't even have a website* to file what may be the silliest antitrust lawsuit I've seen in a long time. It's so bad that by the end of it, Parler may very well be paying Amazon a lot of money.

There are so many other things I'd rather be writing about, so I'll just highlight a few of the problems with Parler's very bad, no good, horrible, stupidly ridiculous lawsuit. If you want more, I recommend reading Twitter threads by Akiva Cohen or Neil Chilson or Berin Szoka or basically any lawyer with any amount of basic knowledge of antitrust law. The lawsuit is dumb and bad and it's going to do more harm to Parler than good.

The key part of the lawsuit is that Parler, without evidence, claims that Amazon had "political animus" against it, and that it conspired with Twitter to shut down a competitor. It provides no proof of either thing, and... even if it did show proof of political animus, that's... not against the law. And that's kind of a big deal. They're basically saying it's an antitrust violation to dislike Parler. Which it's not. But even if it were, they are simply making up false reasons for why AWS booted Parler.

AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparentlymotivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competitionin the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.

I mean, even just this paragraph makes no sense. You may have noticed that Amazon and Twitter are different companies. The complaint is against Amazon. Amazon doesn't compete with Parler. None of this makes any sense. The next paragraph demonstrates how rushed and stupid and bad this lawsuit is:

Thus, AWS is violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act incombination with Defendant Twitter. AWS is also breaching it contract withParler, which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice beforeterminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actuallyprovided. Finally, AWS is committing intentional interference with prospectiveeconomic advantage given the millions of users expected to sign up in the nearfuture

With Defendant Twitter? Let's scroll back up and look at the caption again:

There's only one defendant. And it's not Twitter.

The complaint goes on and on about how there's also bad stuff on Twitter, as if somehow that makes it wrong for AWS to be upset about Parler. But... Parler's whole entire claim to fame is that it moderates differently than Twitter, so claiming that there's the same stuff on Twitter is meaningless. Even worse, the example that Parler uses of how Twitter and Parler have similar content is around people suggesting that political officials including Congressional Representatives, Senators, and VP Mike Pence should be hanged. But the evidence that Parler itself provides undermines its own case, and in some cases directly contrasts its own claims. That's not just bad lawyering, that's legal malpractice.

Here is what Parler says:

What is more, by pulling the plug on Parler but leaving Twitter alonedespite identical conduct by users on both sites, AWS reveals that its expressedreasons for suspending Parler’s account are but pretext. In its note announcing thepending termination of Parler’s service, AWS alleged that “[o]ver the past severalweeks, we’ve reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage andincite violence.” Exhibit A. AWS provide a few examples, including one that stated,“How bout make them hang?”, followed by a series of hashtags, incl