I'm going to agree with the parent comment: The question of ISPs being a public utility or not is crucial for this discussion because it goes to the core of the issue of what should be a privilege and what should be a right.
If you can be booted from Amazon because it's a private company then you can also be refused service by your ISP. And there's an argument to be made that, at some point down the chain (AWS, DNS, ISP) you should have a right to internet access. Should Amazon be forced to offer unconditional access to Parler? Probably not. But right now there's nothing stopping ISPs from cutting people's internet connection just because they don't like what the customers are doing with it, and that's a much thornier issue.
Regulating ISPs like utilities would delineate a clear line in the sand for problems like this.
Forcing the equation by talking about this from the perspective of ISPs is a lot easier in my head.
Other technologies that build upon the basic connectivity are much more subjective in their entitlements. I.e. you could run your own DNS name servers, so perhaps something like DNS or DDoS protection is viewed more as an open-market opportunity on top of the utility.
The barest of essentials for a self-operated cloud service would be IP connectivity, public TLS CA and domain registrar. Maybe we should look at these technology features in the same way we do frequency control, voltage and standardization in the electrical grid. DNS, compute, storage, DDoS protection, et. al., would be analogous to all of the various appliances you have connected to your electrical system at home or work.
>I'm going to agree with the parent comment: The question of ISPs being a public utility or not is crucial for this discussion because it goes to the core of the issue of what should be a privilege and what should be a right.
I'd go further than that. Requiring ISPs to be dumb pipes (that means no port blocking or throttling, among other things) can reduce the power and influence of the large social media players by making it easier to host your own data[0][1][2] and share what you want with whom you want.
No middlemen, no abusive data mining/tracking, etc.
But doing so requires that ISPs are not gatekeepers, just suppliers of bandwidth/routing.
EDIT: I think we have enough to discuss here without bringing up hypothetical situations that would make us all very sad.