[yock]

Alternatives exist, what you're complaining about is that they're not popular. You aren't entitled to viable alternatives. If a private business acts in a way contrary to your beliefs, your only option is to stop using them. Having an alternative private business to choose is nice, but never guaranteed.

[dingo_bat]

Can you tell me what's the alternative for Youtube? Or github? The alternative should be a real alternative, not a useless replica. For example, I should be able to watch latest movie trailers, music videos, tech reviews, etc. on the youtube alternative. And I should be able to report issues to Microsoft's VS code project.

This is not just about popularity. On the internet, winner takes all. The monopoly is extreme in every type of website/service. If you can't use Youtube, you effectively cannot watch videos on the web. If you are banned by github, you cannot participate in the global open source community.

There are 2 solutions:

1. Break the monopolies.

2. Force them to respect my rights, similar to the government.

[ekianjo]

Git is a decentralized version system there is absolutely no reason to have to use Github to work on any open source project.

Youtube is no monopoly. You have hundreds of sites offering video streaming services and you can broadcast your own as well using other services not affiliated to youtube. The fact that almost everyone uses Youtube does not make it a monopoly.

[yock]

> Break the monopolies

Can you explain what makes Youtube and Github monopolies when both have competitors in the market?

> Force them to respect my rights, similar to the government.

What rights do you think you have that they are violating?

[xg15]

> When private actors behave badly, you can opt out and go for competiting services.

> You aren't entitled to viable alternatives.

????

[adventured]

There's an extraordinary difference between you being entitled to a company being forced to exist to serve whatever arbitrary need or approach you wish, and there being an open market such that a competitor can set up shop.

If you were entitled to alternatives, that means the tax payer has to reasonably fund every possible alternative that could exist, or at a minimum a vast array of them, and most likely at perpetual losses. It'd be extraordinarily dumb and would become an epic cost for the government and would breed corruption (failed businesses, bleeding vast red ink, perpetually subsidized no matter what they do).

[xg15]

True in the general case - however, it gets strange when that argument is used to defend monopolies, i.e. markets that, for whatever reason, are not open.

E.g., I personally don't see why it's bad when an elected government passes legislation but totally fine when Apple uniterally updates the App Store ToS or Google excludes certain things from Search. In both cases, participants of the respective markets won't have any choice than to comply.

I believe YouTube is comparable. Yes, there are alternatives. However, YouTube's popularity is important for content producers. If you make your own video content and are banned from YouTube, you'll likely have a significantly harder time to be discovered.

I agree with you that this woudn't really be an issue for GitHub, since there is neither a market nor any lock-in effects or monopoly.

[bzbarsky]

There are absolutely lock-in effects.

You want to participate in web standards groups? You have to use github to do so in any sort of effective fashion.

Same thing for various open-source projects.

The _owner_ of a project has a bit more say in things, though I've heard some people claim that in order to attract contributors a project must be on GitHub nowadays, because many people will fail (or refuse) to participate in any way other than GitHub pull requests.

So I agree with you about Apple and YouTube; I just think GitHub is closer to them than you think it is...

[yock]

When you cherry pick quotes from the source it sounds contradictory. What I meant, and what I feel was clear when taken in context, is that alternatives exist in this particular case. However if you do not think those alternatives are viable then that's just too bad. You aren't entitled to viable alternatives, or alternatives that fit your definition of viable.