Can we use S3 and EC2 to host free speech?
As far as I know the issues around Amazon's decision to evict WikiLeaks from EC2 have not been discussed in the tech blogosphere. If I've missed the discussion, please post pointers in a comment on this post. I want to read what has been said.
Context & Ripple Effects
The question lands three weeks after Amazon's denial that it dropped WikiLeaks because of a government inquiry — an eviction that left the stated reason ambiguous while WikiLeaks faced no charges from the Justice Department over its State Department disclosures. A spate of DDoS attacks around the document dump has kept the hosting question live, and policy makers are already pushing tighter internet controls in the leaks' wake.
What makes this post pointed is its timing on Christmas Day 2010 and its observation that the tech blogosphere has largely not engaged with what the eviction means for the platforms everyone else builds on. S3 and EC2 are where independent publishing increasingly lives, so Amazon's terms-of-service discretion is effectively a speech policy — one set by contract rather than by any court.
First-order effects
- WikiLeaks is off EC2 entirely, and every other publisher hosting politically sensitive material on AWS now knows its tenure rests on Amazon's unilateral reading of acceptable use rather than legal process.
Second-order effects
- Amazon must either articulate where its terms stop and lawful-but-unwelcome speech begins, or accept that customers weighing WikiLeaks-style risk will price self-hosting back into their infrastructure decisions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a host evicts an uncharged publisher and faces little sustained industry debate — the effective guarantee of online speech migrates from courts and due process to the terms of service of a handful of infrastructure providers.
The trend: Cloud infrastructure is becoming the de facto arbiter of what can be published online, with provider terms of service displacing legal process as the operative test for controversial speech.