[AnthonyMouse]

They are buying one. The market rate happens to be free; they don't charge money for people to post videos on YouTube. But now Google is saying they won't sell you a soapbox, the same way they do everyone else, based on what you have to say. Building your own YouTube is not within the capacity of ordinary people.

You can either have companies that make decisions for their platforms or you can have monopoly/oligopoly platforms, but not both.

[wvenable]

No, using a free service is not the same as purchasing something that happens to be zero dollars. If there is a contractual relationship you can be sure that the terms are that Google can remove your video for any reason of their choosing and by using their service you are agreeing to that. And you do agree with that because it's free.

Nobody says you have to build your own YouTube as that is certainly not the only way you can get your message out. You're just being cheap. You want free stuff without consequences and that's not how the world works or how it should work.

[AnthonyMouse]

It has nothing to do with cheap. Anybody can register a domain name and buy a web server and buy a building to put it in and internet service to host it with and post all their videos and they'll get zero page views even after spending all of that money because nobody can find them.

The thing YouTube has that isn't available to the average Joe isn't web servers, it's all the glue that comes from being a part of Google which causes YouTube videos to show up in search results and recommendations when the exact same video posted on Joe's Self-Hosted Blog does not. This makes YouTube and Facebook and similarly massive corporations in not the same position as the corner store who should be able to refuse to sell you things for any reason they want, because there you could always buy it from a thousand other places. In this case the thousand other places don't exist.

Moreover, having people pay for something doesn't constrain speech when everybody who wants to speak pays the same amount. But when you start changing the amount based on what they want to say, you're imposing a penalty on expressing certain opinions.

[wvenable]

> they'll get zero page views even after spending all of that money because nobody can find them.

You might not be cheap anymore, now you're just lazy. It used to be that if you had something important to say you might actually have to climb out of the basement, walk to the church, and post your words to the door.

The expectation that others should both host and promote your crazy ideas for free is the problem.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It used to be that if you had something important to say you might actually have to climb out of the basement, walk to the church, and post your words to the door.

It's not 1950. Church attendance has been on the decline for decades. It's an audience of maybe a thousand in a country of over three hundred million. There is no lack of laziness that can scale in-person communication to compete with the internet.

But it's even more ridiculous to suggest going to meatspace meeting places to discuss a pandemic which is keeping everybody out of places like that.

> The expectation that others should both host and promote your crazy ideas for free is the problem.

The expectation exists because it's what they do for other ideas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

If they want to charge money to all YouTube creators equally or shut down YouTube entirely and let it all drain out into other platforms then nobody's stopping them, but a duty of impartiality has to come with being that big.

[wvenable]

> It's not 1950

I was referring to 1517, actually.

> There is no lack of laziness that can scale in-person communication to compete with the internet.

That's the problem. Ideas used to require effort to spread. You'd have to be the President of the United States to get an audience big enough to drink bleach but now you can get kids to eat Tide pods without any effort at all. All ideas are not equal and free has distorted the entirety of human discourse.

> Duty of impartiality

There is no way to be impartial. YouTube censors probably millions of videos every day for outright illegal content, for copyright infringement, for inappropiateness. It's what they have to do to keep the site alive. It may appear to be mostly uncurated but that's not true -- any uncurated site eventually falls apart.

Anyway, most people seem to making the other argument lately -- that sites like Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube are so big that they have duty to stop the spread of propaganda, fake news, libel, and harmful material. What would you say to that?

[dependenttypes]

> Anybody can register a domain name and buy a web server

Until they kick you out. The only solution would be to use tor but then you would get even less views.

[whatisaquiche]

Imagine if Martin Luther decided again making his post had he been discouraged by getting “even less views.”

This generation is obsessed with prospect of “getting lots of views” to the point where it becomes the only metric of success.