All: this seems to be quite a provocative topic, as with many submissions that involve children and parents. If you're going to comment, please post thoughtfully and follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you can't do that, please don't post until you can.
This whole thing feels like Monopoly money. First, it’s $200m to a company valued at more than $800B.
Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.
But on top of that, it’s $200m into the black hole that is our dysfunctional and bloated federal government. How do The Impacted children whose privacy was violated actually benefit.
Proper comparison is the reaction of a CEO - if the CEO responds by firing the upper management->product management responsible for the part that caused the fine then the fine got a point across.
> Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business.
I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.
I don't believe for a second that this represents the minority. One might be tempted to conjure reddit-like images of Chads and Karens who park their cars where ever, when ever, and for however long they like, but the majority of people aren't like this.
That doesn’t really work for a company like google with a largely blameless culture.
The only way of really judging is through repeat offences which is difficult in a case like this where the judgement was that Google didn’t do enough. That line of “enough” is going to be redefined a lot as the web develops (as it should be).
> That doesn’t really work for a company like google with a largely blameless culture.
That's only the case because the cost of mistakes are insignificant. Should the mistakes start costing them 5% of revenue you can bet a farm that the person would be fired.
> The settlement would be the largest civil penalty ever obtained by the F.T.C. in a children’s privacy case. It dwarfs the previous record fine of $5.7 million for children’s privacy violations the agency levied this year against the owners of TikTok, a social video-sharing app.
This was a warning to YouTube, but from their perspective, there's clearly a subtext of "we're not afraid to raise the fines, next time could be a lot worse".
I would normally say that the most reasonable comparison is to the profit obtained from related features or products. For example, the FTC should be able to fine Alphabet up to however much profit YouTube makes serving kids in the US. Unfortunately, it is widely rumored that YouTube makes no profit, and that means they almost certainly don't make much money off of kids. Still, at some point, you have to watch out that the fines don't get so big that it just makes sense for YouTube to ban all content targeting kids, at least in the US, because that would be a disaster for everyone given the amount of educational content there. Google pulled out of the China market because the moral and economic costs of complying with government regulations wasn't worth the value of the market, we don't want them doing the same thing here for specific products.
> Google pulled out of the China market because the moral and economic costs of complying with government regulations wasn't worth the value of the market..
I think humans are a lot more robust than commonly assumed. Most of us do not break due to their mere experiences as long as their fundamental needs (food, being loved, goals and so on) are fulfilled. Once these needs are not fulfilled they may be more vulnerable though.
I feel the opposite. Based on how people (and myself) behave, humans love to prioritize short term dopamine hits with long term costs. Whether it be children addicted to YouTube, people addicted to sugar and inactivity (see obesity), refreshing Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/instagram/Hacker News for new bits of information, etc. We’re even willing to trash the planet if it gives us the satisfaction of living in single family homes with parking and some land for heavily fertilized grass.
As a species, humans are getting better at using our susceptibility of the short term pleasures to operate businesses, but the long term effects are probably not going to be desirable.
The points you are raising (addiction) seem to be somewhat unrelated to what was being discussed (inappropriate content).
Of course addictions are bad, but do you have any data supporting your claim that technology has increased the number of addicts? People vulnerable to be drawn to short-term dopamine hits have always existed, whether to food, gambling, or actual drugs.
There are many negative responses to inappropriate content, and with regards to the subtopic of "breaking", addiction is one. Addiction can exacerbate other responses such as depression or anxiety, but I wouldn't rule it out as a response.
As for increased number of addicts, I think the fact that there are technology addicts where there didn't used to be (before tech), should be a sufficient logical claim.
Speaking of which, do you have data on your specific claim on the resilience of human psychology against negative tech/media experiences?
> As for increased number of addicts, I think the fact that there are technology addicts where there didn't used to be (before tech), should be a sufficient logical claim.
No, because those people may have engaged in other unhealthy lifestyles if the technology didn't exist.
> Speaking of which, do you have data on your specific claim on the resilience of human psychology against negative tech/media experiences?
I was assuming the inappropriate content included videos such as the unboxing or adults playing with toys videos that seem to entrance children. I don't have data for technology increasing number of addicts, but my claim is that people seem to be susceptible to a number of cognitive biases that hinder their long term survival.
It is, however, important to take note of how this robustness varies with age, just what proportion of people "most" counts as, and whether the most absolute category of humans "breaking" is most appropriate when we take into account the massive variation of mental states, disorders and the entire field of media effects and child psychology.
But consider for example the link between violent video games and prosocial outcomes. The effect sizes are tiny. The downsides of additional filters will very likely outweigh anything that can be gained regarding mental health and childhood development etc. I'd wager there are much much more effective ways of improving quality of life, e.g. improving community life, reducing working hours, reduce economic inequality etc.
I think young humans are not developed enough to understand that the media's high praise of corruptive behavior is not healthy. I think young people are growing up thinking all the outrageous and adult content on the media platforms is not just some outlier entertainment, but rather that's what their future is going to be.
What do their own folks who have children think? There must be some internal pressure on that issue but probably one of those things that get ignored.
Why don’t we hear about their internal protests to management and sit outs, etc? If they’re getting fined, it’s more than just public opinion and advocacy it’s preventing illegal activity.
Do googlers let their [young] children use YouTube? I thought parents in tech were usually more restrictive on what they allowed their kids to spend time on
Maybe not YouTube proper, but I would hope Googlers let their kids watch YouTube Kids. It would be a damning review on the product if its own engineers refuse to let their children use it.
There have been several high-profile articles in respectable magazines and newspapers lately which detail how the "tech elite" very often send their children to special schools with little or no technology, and severely limit their own children's access to technology at home.
Meanwhile, they make billions off of feeding lowest common denominator content to everyone else's children.
Probably a lot of eye rolling at the fine and whispy statements to each other like, “ they don’t understand, it takes time for the algorithms to get this stuff right.” Typical group think. They can feel like they’re doing good without actually doing it.
Oh yeah, there's definitely disturbing stuff on YouTube, not denying that. I just thing if most edgy think on Trending is PewDiePie, it's not too bad. I know it's hard, but kids should be with their parents anyway, when online at a young age.
I agree. There are many people who I've seen say "this is just a warning to other companies" or "this is just the beginning" but it seems like that's always the case.
The fact is, the fine needs to be multiples of quarterly revenue. It needs to be so high not to destroy the company, but enough to make it limp and force it to borrow money to make it through. THEN these will be taken seriously. Until then, these aren't fines. These are price tags for unethical, law-breaking behavior, and these companies are more than happy to pay it.
Force them to borrow money? How big a fine we talking in your authoritarian world? How many people's jobs is it worth losing?
No. It does not need to be so damn high.
YouTube is aware of the warning, and yes it likely deserves another (order of magnitude larger) fine if they do nothing. But arbitrary fines right out of the gate just hurt everyone.
Unless they've made huge steps in their profit margins, it's still pretty big consisering they weren't profitable in 2015 [0] and likely still not profitable in 2016 [1]. The only argument you could make is the immense value of user data Google gets from YT to show relevant ads outside of the platform.
Will this create a new virtual 18+ wall before you can view/access content/services. Not that it is illegal by any law to offer such services to those younger, just that the lawyers and the accountants sat down and concluded that the risks can outgrow the rewards.
Be interesting how the industry and various platforms navigate this whole area, but I'm mindful that they may well just cut them off period as just less hassle for them.
I'm not sure of your age but I grew up with the internet and this "18+ wall" has already existed for a long time. I don't think I know anybody who didn't lie about their birth year on a signup form at some point to get around an age check.
That's kinda the point, the whole age verification avenue has no credibility and personally I've lied for privacy reasons as why do you need the day and month if the year is 18+.
But the area of concern I was raising was such walls being used for no other reason other than risk liability exposure dictated by liability insurance costs. That with age verification systems that are that do credable checks being an area of growth thru demand. Such systems will become easier to implement and the ability to just lie, becomes much more complicated. Hence people being cut off, not thru legal reasons, but for effect - accountants. That's the worry I was raising.
I for one am glad at this though I am sure the fine could have been exponentially larger. The fact that YouTube can go here and say their platform is only intended for 13 year olds and up is a joke. Their are thousands of shows targeted directly at my kids. I can even clearly hear one video my kid likes to watch starts out with saying “look kids” so tell me how that is not directed at kids. I use an adblocker but when I go to my moms she doesn’t have it set up on her iPad. The kids shows are bombarded with ads for adult products like cars or you name it. They are marketing towards kids and I can’t stand it.
You need to be a parent and not expect regulatory fines to watch your children. You've identified a problem, you've identified the cause, and now you need to do something about it within your household.
You're literally talking about a video you let your child watch, while bemoaning the FCC needing to step in.
> The fact that YouTube can go here and say their platform is only intended for 13 year olds and up is a joke
The joke is that you understand YouTube is for 13 year olds and up, and you still allow your child on there. Personal responsibility needs to come first.
> They are marketing towards kids and I can’t stand it.
What kind of home router do you have. I'll show you how to block YouTube. Your mom can do similar things at home. There are plenty of blocking solutions out there. Which ones have you tried?
How is demanding fines not being a parent? They are not mutually exclusive.
The comment about moms blocking YouTube is a bit ridiculous. Seems hard to believe likelihood of finding one could be higher than the likelihood of finding a kid who can work around it.
One should come before the other. You should parent before calling for regulations.
> The comment about moms blocking YouTube is a bit ridiculous. Seems hard to believe likelihood of finding one could be higher than the likelihood of finding a kid who can work around it.
It is not hard to block domains at the router, and restrict the devices your child has access to. Of course they might use a friends, or find a way around it. But the OP is literally talking about overhearing the video on the couch and not doing anything about it.
Completely wrong, everything targeted at children (for decades) is regulated. If your kid is watching Sesame Street on PBS and an ad for The Sopranos appears - that does not happen for a reason.
Uploading cartoon nursery rhymes and having an ad for drug trafficking come up is idiotic.
It very may well be regulated, sure, but what is completely wrong exactly? Parents are responsible for their children! Is this incorrect? We can go back to how parents blame everyone but themselves when their kid steals their credit card to buy, say, loot boxes.
We don't want a society where parents have to helicopter their children. We want a society where parents can give their children gradual access to freedom.
> We can go back to how parents blame everyone but themselves when their kid steals their credit card to buy, say, loot boxes.
This is a completely different problem. Content is made for children. Those content creators don't want unsuitable ads in the content. The children enjoy watching the content. Those children don't want unsuitable ads. The parents are happy for their children to watch the content. Those parents don't want unsuitable ads.
All YouTube has to do is give content creators a checkbox: "Is this content aimed at people under 18?", then not place ads for gambling or alcohol or horror movies etc against that content.
YouTube needs to be aware that regulation is coming, and they're not going to like what the EU will impose.
> We want a society where parents can give their children gradual access to freedom.
Of course. There was another submission under which the US was called out for having less of that in comparison to Europe. As I said, kids are free to be kids around here in Eastern Europe, there are lots of playgrounds being built for them, they are usually allowed to go to school and back alone, and so on. Kids' freedom is less restricted in the name of safety.
> We don't want a society where parents have to helicopter their children.
I am not sure what exactly you mean by this. What I am trying to say is that if someone's kids buy something with their credit card, then perhaps they should find a solution to that within the household (parenting) instead of asking the Government to step in.
Regarding my example, I only meant to bring up the trend which I observed lately that some parents put the blame on everyone else but themselves, that is, they do not assume parental responsibility.
> All YouTube has to do is give content creators a checkbox: "Is this content aimed at people under 18?", then not place ads for gambling or alcohol or horror movies etc against that content.
Yes, I do agree with not placing ads targeted for adults when the videos are targeted for children. There is a solution to it right now though, namely ad blockers. Parents could install or ask their kids to install, say, uBlock and perhaps even uMatrix. They do not have to wait for the regulations. :)
You are partially correct. Yes parents are responsible for their kids but not always. We have laws making it illegal for kids to buy alcohol. If the store sells alcohol to my kid they have broken the law and it was their responsibility to not sell it to my kid. So as you can see there are examples out in the world where yes as a parent we teach our kids alcohol is bad and for kids wait to an adult but the responsibility for not allowing that actually falls on all of society. You can't legally serve a kid alcohol. And I also believe the same will be said of Youtube. You can't serve all this content obviously directed at little kids, and lets cut the bullshit this is directed at kids or do I need to go find several videos and link to them where they into the video saying "hey kids...today bla bla bla", and then fill it with predatory ads. The TV industry was hit with this years and years ago and made a standard for tv shows so children did not get exposed to crap. Youtube surely saw this coming? They let is happen for years so again I think they deserve this punishment but wish it was even bigger.
Yes they are, but you're leaving out the most important point here. It's content SPECIFICALLY designed for babies. The onus is on the producer - whether it's toys, videos, ads - for us to have some regulation saying x is ok but not y.
By your method of thinking...let's just make everything OK for babies and let the parents decide.
That makes no sense...it's why society has laws (Why can't I go buy a bazooka in Europe? Because there are laws).
> You're literally talking about a video you let your child watch, while bemoaning the FCC needing to step in.
But other video providers can make sure that video and the ads placed against that video is suitable for children. I can let a 7 year old sit and watch uk ITV kids content for an hour and I know it'll be fine. I cannot do that for YouTube, because YT ignores the regulatory framework.
That framework is largely voluntary, so sure they don't _have_ to comply with it. But whenever this comes up (especially with taxes) people say "if you don't like non-compliance with voluntary regulation just change the law". And then, when the law is changed (eg, GDPR), people lose their shit and talk about how restrictive the law is.
> I can let a 7 year old sit and watch uk ITV kids content for an hour and I know it'll be fine. I cannot do that for YouTube, because YT ignores the regulatory framework.
That's mostly because ITV is a television network and YT is a platform, not a publisher. ITV curates the content (and the ads), YT does not. One is meant for children, the other is not, though some third parties are putting content on the YT platform aimed at children. Those are major differences. If you want to let a child alone in front of a screen, turn to television.
Isn't there a YouTube kids version? I'm not a parent so I've never used it and I've been curious since I also see that Netflix had a cordoned off sections for kids too. I'm not sure if these are sufficient content and feature wise?
Also is there any parental consent thing going on here as well with how YouTube words it?
I remember seeing plenty of adult ads as a kid watching TV at night time watching with my parents. The morning kids shows and kids channels always had ads for children of course. Id imagine it's in YouTubes interest not to show kids adult ads as well, most adults probably aren't sitting around watching the same shows with them to make the adult ads useful.
There is but it is not free from very disturbing issues (search for 'elsagate').
Also YouTube Kids has no quality controls. It uses more bandwidth, due to our hires tablet display I guess, than any other device in our household. Very annoying when on capped LTE on a trip.
There is and any parent giving their phone/tablet to young kids should at minimum make sure it's YouTube Kids they're watching. It doesn't have ads or comments section, for example. As for its content being sufficiently filtered or not - nowadays I think it is.
We, the parents, should of course try to minimize the amount of time our kids spend with youtube or in general with phones/tablets/TVs.
Cartoon nursery rhymes directed at as low as even 1 year olds will sometimes have ads popup for a tv show containing drugs and guns. Completely inappropriate!
EVERYTHING that deals with children whether directly or indirectly is strictly regulated, and rightly so.
Television programming as an example, for 70 years only permits certain ads to be displayed on children's shows.
YouTube should be regulated by the FCC in regards to this and very easily can have a checkbox for advertisers and providers to check that says the content is for under 13 or not.
I've complained to the UK regulator about gambling ads placed in children's content and they are paying attention.
They say it's hard because YouTube forbids (because COPPA) anyone under 13 from having an account, which means those children use their parent's accounts, and so the demographics used by the advertisers are skewed.
However, they did take action against every single gambling company I complained about because the ads were placed against children's content.
> Cartoon nursery rhymes directed at as low as even 1 year olds will sometimes have ads popup for a tv show containing drugs and guns. Completely inappropriate!
Does that still happen if you actually pay for the service via Prermium subscription? Or only if you want to use it completely free and paying nothing?
It's a two sided market; the player with the largest catalog wins. Youtube has also negotiated the copyright minefield extremely well - starting a competitor would have to deal with takedowns.
A competitor who finds a way to deal with copyright better, has a sane advertising policy that doesn't randomly demonetizes people, with a patreon system built in, and has a modern UI (YouTube has a lot of room for improvement) it could possibly compete with YouTube.
A whole lot of major YouTube channels who are constantly attacked by false copyright claims or have to push product placements due to no ads would love to push users to a better platform. So marketing wouldn't be impossible.
They could also push privacy and fine tuned data controls which helps with kids.
There's enough of a market for two to exist.
Maybe with some type of semi decentralized platform approach so individual hosts who deal with copyright poorly can take the hit, making the system more resilient. Chrome style apps and mobile clients could be the interface and the ad/patreon system is controlled by the primary software developer but the rest is an open protocol with a linear license for non commercial stuff (at least non commercial as far as not competing with the monetization platform). The network effects of managing the ad buyers, subscriber accounts with credit cards and one click subs could stave off the competition without fully controlling the full video network and hosts.
Sure, just build a video streaming website with good UI, a good recommendation/discovery algorithm, it's own avertising network (that is able to compete with YTs excellent personalized ads while having a more creator-friendly policy), spend more on human review of copyright claims than YT, establish a revenue share system for creators, as well as a system to pay monthly pledges similar to YT channel memberships or patreon (of course both need to comply with laws and regultions of all major countries), and have the budget to finance multiple months of video streaming and encoding servers.
There's space in the market, but I don't think anyone is willing to pay for that after so many others failed.
> Sure, just build a video streaming website with good UI, a good recommendation/discovery algorithm, it's own avertising network
I'm sorry to pick on you because I also disagree with the post you replied to.
In that list, didn't you forget to mention something very important that's at the heart of this discussion?
A competitor or even google should have all those things _plus_ it should be legal.
Currently, it isn't. Either change the law or change the business model, but don't implement a business model that breaks the law and hope it will turn out fine in the end.
You can't have every business breaking laws it disagrees with, not even if some or most people disagree with that law.
This is a perfect project for a successful entrepreneur who wants to solve a hard problem just like the Duckduckgo founder.
This is the type of hard problem I'm getting more and more interested in. Someone has to bring the future open and privacy oriented Web about some day. The current model is broken and the early Internet showed us what is possible. Web 2.0 brought none of the democratization it promised largely because of the old world model it attempted to deliver it with.
Plus none of the things you listed are hard. Technical problems are easy, it's the market and growth that's hard.
I'm personally focused on Reddit, mostly theoretically atm, but YouTube is something I've considered as well.
> Web 2.0 brought none of the democratization it promised
It introduced formula "If you're not paying for a product, you are the product", while in old world model delivery of value is more about givers/takers ratio.
Well, there's at least two other competitors - Vimeo and Dailymotion - but neither has the fame or reach. And Peertube exists, but is comparatively tiny.
> A competitor who finds a way to deal with copyright better, has a sane advertising policy that doesn't randomly demonetizes people, with a patreon system built in, and has a modern UI (YouTube has a lot of room for improvement) it could possibly compete with YouTube.
A competitor that grows to the size of YouTube will face all the same pressures from publishers, legislators, advertisers, and malicious actors, and will almost certainly turn into something that looks a hell of a lot like YouTube does today.
Oh, and since it'll be advertising-supported (Nobody will want to pay $10/month for a significantly-worse to slightly-better YouTube alternative), it'll also be bending over backwards to make advertisers happy... Gosh, I wonder what the likely outcome of that is going to be.
Can you even imagine pitching this to a VC?
"We're going to build a YouTube alternative that doesn't suck, that will piss off major content owners[1], and will be a haven for bad actors. We're going to be amazing, give us money!"
[1] Who will sue us for every cent that we have ever, or will ever own.
Personally only some small fraction of the creators I watch on YouTube monetize their videos and all of them have another source of income in addition to that (paid promotions, merchandice, pattreon, concerts etc.)
I think everyone would be happy without the revenue sharing.
What we really need is a good video podcast viewer.
If you aren't expecting YouTube to pay you, the list of problems that content creators has with YouTube shrinks dramatically.
The remaining problems are largely due to copyright enforcement and abuse... Which don't just magically go away, just because you're not doing revenue sharing.
It's a chicken and egg problem: users won't switch platforms until their favorite creators switch over, and the creators won't switch over if nobody's there to watch their videos.
Well in any case it's pretty clear which one needs to come first, convince the creators and they'll push existing users to the new platform.
The chicken problem is more about the ad buyers and the users, not creators. The patreon system scales better this way but the ads are what holds most back.
I know quite a few YouTube channels who tried pushing one of those
awful decentralized versions of YouTube that look like Chinese knockoffs when the either the demonetization and copyright stuff bit them hard and threatened (or simply ruined) years of their hard work, but there was never a proper alternative to offer. I'm sure they'd love a legitimate alternative designed by top tier designers and developers for once.
Otherwise the creators will have no financial incentive to route users to another platform. Which is a far higher problem than not having enough other people commenting on the same video as other users.
That's where the problem is, a lot of popular content creators have contracts with large media groups which specifically prevents them to upload to another platform.
That'd work fine for small channels, but you can bet that the big ones do have exclusivity contracts. Not with YouTube directly, but media groups that tie them to YouTube.
In-video sponsors like Skillshare, NordVPN, Dollar Shave Club or whatever don't contact channels directly. There's someone representing them.
Nobody wants to admit this because everyone here hates ads, but they (ads) are the thing these other YouTube competitors lack and the reason they're not taking off.
As I understand it, YouTube remains unprofitable to this date. What game is Google playing at here? Creators are unhappy with the strong arming, users are displeased with the ads and the comments and, well, everything. Parents are unhappy with the creepy videos targeting children. YouTube music is a travesty and is likely to fail like all the other half-baked Google products. YouTube gaming... is dead. Now they're getting fined for something they could have easily avoided.
What in the hell is Google doing, and why do they suck at this so bad? I can imagine so many better product experiences. Why can't they get their act together?
Tangential, you need to click the (i) and then click the actual url ( although they didn't actually mark it as a hyperlink). Amp is getting more and more frustrating w/ each iteration.
Yeah right. The competition is doing so well. Try running a video hosting service within the frameworks of the law. It's still the most popular service by a longshot. Classic HN being delusional again.
Do people go to Facebook directly to just watch video from their non-friends? Is it even possible? Genuinely asking, I haven’t used FB for quite some time.
We're talking about monetised, profitable, video content aimed at children.
These other companies can manage it.
YouTube can't, but importantly YouTube wants it both ways - they want to include content that targets children without providing any of the protection that parents expect.
And that expectation isn't unreasonable. We don't want parents who helicopter every waking hour of their children's lives, we want to give parents some freedoms to allow their children to explore and grow.