Interview with CEO of SkySilk, the hosting company that helped bring Parler online, who says he did it to spite tech giants like Amazon who abuse their might
On Jan. 10, just days after pro-Trump rioters blitzed the U.S. Capitol, Amazon Web Services pulled the plug on the conservative social media site Parler. Tweets: @gelliebeans1 , @npr , @jimstinnett , @tompalmsprings , @rojawi , @davidfolkenflik , @bobbyallyn , and @tundrawolfqueen Tweets: Gelliebeans / @gelliebeans1 : Skysilk and companies like Epik owned by Monster are able to save controversial sites like, “Daily Stormer”&"Parler" so the haters have a place to foment their hate while others lurk and get ideas. #business https://www.npr.org/... @npr : Last month, an obscure company called SkySilk brought Parler back online — after Amazon pulled the plug over violent and hateful posts that Parler allegedly refused to take down. Here's what we know about the company. https://www.npr.org/... El Kabong / @jimstinnett : #Skysilk is like K-Y Jelly for Propaganda and #DomesticTerrorists They provide breeding dens for Mindfucking Racist Brainwashing Experts to bake Hate into the Internet. It's not Free Speech if it's a Weapon used against Truth. @MarkTLive @RichardHourula https://www.npr.org/... Tom Andrew / @tompalmsprings : Parler had relied on Amazon's web hosting services to reach its burgeoning audience of more than 12 million. After Amazon cut it off, it was rejected by six other web hosts. It seemed doomed to disappear from the web. Until SkySilk showed up. https://www.npr.org/... @rojawi : Sketchy web-hosting business will take on anyone as a client, even Parler. CEO says he really hates “Big Tech” and wants to retire early so he can do film projects. https://www.npr.org/... David Folkenflik / @davidfolkenflik : “One early employee said SkySilk was losing tens of thousands of dollars every month and the reason for its existence at all was murky.” @BobbyAllyn on the company that stepped in to save Parler https://twitter.com/... Bobby Allyn / @bobbyallyn : This obscure web hosting firm SkySilk saved Parler. I dug into the company, interviewed former employees who are confounded and unsettled by the “sketchy” business. I went to LA to interview the SkySilk CEO. He told me: “It's not a shell company” https://www.npr.org/... @tundrawolfqueen : Parler is a true threat to our democracy. Amazon was right to pull it & it needs to be kept OFF social media period! It's just loaded w/racists & white supremists who will just most likely cont usin it to create more disturbance & treason. 📌 https://www.npr.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Amazon Web Services cut Parler off after Jan. 6, the deplatforming cascade ran deep: six other web hosts refused the site before SkySilk picked it up, a pattern Techdirt framed as the market choosing not to do business with a toxic customer rather than one company's veto. This NPR interview with SkySilk's CEO adds the host's side — he says he took Parler on explicitly to spite Big Tech players like Amazon that he believes abuse their market power.
The interview lands mid-arc: alternative social apps had already surged up the app stores after Trump's bans on Facebook and Twitter, and the hosting layer was becoming the next battleground. SkySilk's own position was precarious — former employees said it was losing tens of thousands of dollars monthly with a murky purpose, and Twitter users criticized it for enabling extremist content.
First-order effects
- SkySilk absorbs the direct costs of its decision: ongoing losses of tens of thousands per month, a public backlash on Twitter, and the burden of hosting a site no other provider would touch after six hosts declined Parler.
- Parler regains an online home, but only by accepting a hosting relationship driven by the provider's ideological grievance against Amazon rather than by commercial terms.
Second-order effects
- Parler's parent company later restructured as Parlement Technologies and, after raising a $16M Series B, acquired Dynascale to sell 'uncancelable' cloud services to other online businesses — turning its deplatforming experience into a product line for the same niche SkySilk serves.
- A parallel track is visible in the coverage: Epik, which hosted the Daily Stormer, shows that a small set of ideology-driven hosts is becoming the fallback infrastructure for sites mainstream providers reject, concentrating controversial traffic with providers who price in reputational risk.
Third-order effects
- If deplatforming at the cloud layer keeps recurring, infrastructure provision splits along moderation lines: mainstream clouds enforce content standards, while a fringe tier of 'uncancelable' hosts monetizes the overflow — shifting the gatekeeping question from social platforms down to whoever rents the servers.
- The Parlement/Dynascale pivot suggests deplatformed platforms may survive not by returning to mainstream clouds but by building rival infrastructure businesses, entrenching a parallel stack whose economics depend on continued conflict with Big Tech — a trajectory whose durability is uncertain given Parler's reported ~50,000 daily active users and its parent's struggle to sell the network.
The trend: Cloud-level deplatforming is pushing controversial platforms toward a niche tier of ideology-driven 'uncancelable' hosting providers, fracturing the infrastructure layer along the same lines as the social platforms above it.