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by jessaustin 2308 days ago
Money: These videos are playing less than they would have without being restricted, therefore less associated advertising is playing. It's probably not much money on Alphabet's scale.

Users: Somewhere in this nation, there is a high school administrator who consents to students learning about politics. There might even be more than one.
1 comments
shadowgovt 2308 days ago
As a private organization, if that's money they want to leave on the table and users they don't choose to serve, that's their right. As you've noted, it's not much at Alphabet's scale.

Another company could pick up the slack. Hell, PragerU could do it. Nothing stopping them from brokering their own ad deals to run prerolls on video they host with their own infrastructure. A few schools might allow access, and many will just black-hole prageru.com in their firewalls.

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jessaustin 2308 days ago
This feels like ground we've already covered ITT. Sure, the current interpretation of current laws allows Alphabet to do basically anything they want. We can still talk about what they should do, and better serving users and making more money are both criteria that can inform that discussion. I thought you had suggested these criteria above.
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shadowgovt 2308 days ago
Indeed; I was speaking broadly, not in absolute categoricals, and my question should have read "Are they leaving large amounts of money or users on the table." My apologies for being unclear. Yes, every decision they make in both directions leaves nonzero money and users on the table.

At Google scale, one has to weigh the risk of false-positive and the risk of false-negative on a low-granularity feature like this, and the risk of error due to misconfiguration being blamed upon YouTube if it's turned into a high-granularity feature. Because the failure mode for YouTube if they false-negative something that is visible to students who should not have seen it (and generate a negative press cycle for themselves) is that schools choose to black-hole youtube.com instead of bothering with Restricted Mode at all. That's what was happening before they added the feature, and it's the reason Restricted Mode exists.

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