If there was a law preventing businesses from refusing service to a group of people, then the government is effectively requiring those businesses to associate with those people. Association is protected as free speech, so that's government-compelled speech. And the First Amendment prohibits the government from "abridging the freedom of speech," which means no compelled speech or association.
Still, we do have some laws compelling speech (tobacco warning labels) and association (restaurants can't refuse to serve Muslims). But there has to be a good justification. Warning labels express facts and prevent harm. Protected classes are all things considered "inherent" to a person (gender, religion, ethnicity). But there's a high bar for these kind of laws. And preventing people from choosing relationships based on politics is clearly against the First Amendment.
>If there was a law preventing businesses from refusing service to a group of people
This isn't about refusing to do business with someone. The issue in my eyes is agreeing to do business with someone and then arbitrarily[1] deciding to not do business with someone, with no recourse to the customer because the provider is a massive conglomerate with unlimited resources.
AWS didn't refuse to do business with Parler, they did business with them for years. Then one day, based on ambiguous and discriminantly applied rules that may or may not apply to Parler's competitors on the same hosting platform, decided to not do business with them. I don't think that's right.
Look at Apple's letter to the Parler CEO regarding being pulled from the App Store: Apple says Parler is responsible for all the content on their site. And yet, Apple doesn't live by the same rules, in fact they actively lobby against them.
[1] Arbitrary because AWS, as far as I've seen, doesn't say "here are the rules you agreed to, here's where you broke them. Goodbye". There's a lot of ambiguity. Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
I'm with you for preventing companies from using their size to force very unfair contracts. But I have to say, in this situation, a fairer contract would probably still let Amazon drop Parler.
> Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.
From the sound of it, Parler was not responding well to requests for moderation and didn't show signs of improvement. Twitter might be better at it. And, for contracts, it shouldn't matter if one party lets some parties slide but is a stickler for others. The contract was the terms on paper, not "These terms or the most lax behaviors for any parties agreeing to the same terms."
Still, we do have some laws compelling speech (tobacco warning labels) and association (restaurants can't refuse to serve Muslims). But there has to be a good justification. Warning labels express facts and prevent harm. Protected classes are all things considered "inherent" to a person (gender, religion, ethnicity). But there's a high bar for these kind of laws. And preventing people from choosing relationships based on politics is clearly against the First Amendment.
>built off of public infrastructure
This describes almost every business.