[Cthulhu_]

But the internet IS decentralized; the RIAA can take down one site, but a dozen will pop up in its place. The RIAA can take down the youtube-dl repo and its clones on Github, but there's thousands of clones on people's local machines.

The internet is not centralized. The RIAA cannot say "this should go" and make it magically disappear. There is no single point of failure / influence on the internet.

Millions of people have the skills to build an easily distributed .zip file with a barebones youtube downloader website. Everybody with an internet connection can set up a webserver that runs it.

And the RIAA will have to go after each individual, one at a time.

They couldn't keep TPB down, at best they managed to annoy it for a little while.