Is this really new? It certainly feels new, but I don't think it is.
There are two issues here.
1) You should be very careful about having your business too dependent on a single supplier or partner. You need to have a backup plan in case that relationship goes bad. That is undeniably true, good advice for all startups, and it has always been true.
2) The more specific case of Parler? Again it feels new, but I don't think it is. There has never been a time in modern history when if all the leading companies in an industry decided your company was too odious to do business with, you would be able to continue to do business.
I'm not saying this is the ideal situation or that we should not discuss how it could be improved, but this is not really anything new.
A corollary to #1 might be to structure your apps and data to be as portable as possible, e.g. use MariaDB or PostGreSQL rather than an AWS-specific dbms, maintain your own backups, etc.
Such portability can pay off in other ways as well. Example: a competitor to Amazon in the retail space told us they would not buy our IoT product with an AWS back end, so we had to port it to an alternative cloud provider.
This probably won't scale well when you get to a level of hundreds of millions of unique users, though.
There are two issues here.
1) You should be very careful about having your business too dependent on a single supplier or partner. You need to have a backup plan in case that relationship goes bad. That is undeniably true, good advice for all startups, and it has always been true.
2) The more specific case of Parler? Again it feels new, but I don't think it is. There has never been a time in modern history when if all the leading companies in an industry decided your company was too odious to do business with, you would be able to continue to do business.
I'm not saying this is the ideal situation or that we should not discuss how it could be improved, but this is not really anything new.