More than a few people noticed when, at midnight Pacific time Monday, Amazon Web Services suspended its hosting for the social network Parler. Just days before, Google and Apple removed the Parler app from the Android and iOS app stores. While it might find another host, Parler, the short-messaging social network used heavily by the groups that stormed the Capitol, is dark at a time when public concern over concentration in the digital economy has reached a fever pitch. The actions of the three companies are different from Twitter’s and Facebook’s decisions to suspend President Trump’s accounts. They affect an entire service, not a person. It’s understandable but wrong to contend that the loss of Parler as a platform is harmful to free speech, competition, or safety. In fact, these companies were right to refuse service to Parler both as a matter of law and policy.

Let’s start with speech. The First Amendment is a limit on government actors, not the private sector, and in particular, does not support the notion that a private business must allow speech — on the contrary, it protects the right of Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services to remove Parler from their platforms. The default, under American law, is that private companies can refuse to offer service absent specific legal obligations such as civil rights laws, which don’t apply here. In fact, there’s a reasonable legal argument that continuing to allow Parler to use Amazon Web Services and app stores exposes the companies to greater liability in the future than taking it down — contrary to widespread belief, Section 230 is not a perfect shield for immunity (including, for example, exceptions for federal criminal law), and critics of tech on both sides are calling for it to be modified or repealed entirely. Failure to act would have emboldened critics on the Left in particular, who are about to control Congress and the White House.