[pumaontheprowl]

If McDonald's mistreats me, I can go to Wendy's or Burger King and get a similar meal for a similar price. When Youtube mistreats me, where am I supposed to go? BitChute? Vimeo? Neither of those have even half the creators as Youtube. And if creators want to migrate off Youtube, how are they supposed to do that when they'll get less than 10% of the audience on the other sites? Youtube's moat way is too deep to be threatened by any competition no matter how technically advanced the competition is.

Youtube is a monopoly and needs to be regulated as such. The electric company can't cut off my power because I was using their electricity to discuss experimental medications, so why should Youtube be allowed to deny me access to the online public square for the same reason? If Youtube wants to be the thought police of their users, they need to first allow an alternative to survive.

[takeda]

This is silly. You have alternatives, but you still are dismissing them. You could similarly say that if "McDonald mistreats me, where I'm going to go? Wendy? or Burger King? no one is going there"

Also your argument with electric company doesn't make sense, in this you could maybe compare it to an ISP, which I agree should be treated as an utility.

YouTube is just one of many services available. Your only argument about competitors is that not many creators are there, well, how do you think that will change? Are you expecting court to move some of YouTube users to Vimeo?

[hluska]

I’m not the person you’re replying to but can I take another shot at expressing their opinion?

Let’s take the argument away from food and move back to networks like YouTube. I’d argue that the best, most innovative thing YouTube accomplished is that they managed to solve a huge chicken or the egg problem. They managed to get enough of an audience to attract creators which has only attracted more of an audience.

How do we deal with companies like that in the context of speech? On one hand, they’re a private company and should have the right to exclude anyone they want for any reason. But what happens when they have so much attention that that exclusion deprives people of hearing right or wrong dissenting opinions?

I genuinely don’t know and my own opinion has swayed so much over the last few months that I’m either dumb or a hypocrite.

[takeda]

Well, they didn't solve the chicken & egg problem, they bought the first platform that was created.

But I don't understand how large audience matters to anyone else than to the platform.

If you're just an user, there's nothing stopping you to use all of these services. In fact given the problem mentioned no one should stick to just one, because that leads to creating a monopoly.

If you're content creator, less of other creators means less competition, your videos are more likely to be featured etc.

[whatshisface]

Well, what's the BurgerKing of YouTube? I don't think there is one. At best Google has Bing, but I think the performance gap is a lot bigger than the gap between chains.

[hervature]

I think people expect the competition to be too perfect of a substitute when it comes to the internet. You are picking the most competitive market - burger joints - in an industry that everyone is forced to partake in: food. On a calorie basis, McDonald's and Burger King actually have some of the most cost effective foods. To me, it is like asking "who is the competitor to Costco? A membership bulk-only retailer, only Sam's Club!"

If we relabel YouTube as "short segment internet video entertainment" than we have things like Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat that all compete for our attention. I would even say that Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc. all compete with YouTube. Of course, they are all unique, but that shouldn't be the bar of measuring "competition". When I used to run a university bar, I would say "we aren't competing with the other bars in town, we are competing with Netflix. How do we convince people to leave their rooms and walk across campus?"

[whatshisface]

That's true from the perspective of users, but not content creators. 3Blue1Brown can't put videos on Netflix or Disney+, and I don't think Twitch would work. It's the content creators that are cornered YouTube's effective monopoly on serving user-uploaded videos with ads.

[hervature]

From the content creator viewpoint, I concede the landscape is much different. But again, is “user-uploaded videos with ads” what we are really talking about? They can sell their own ads and roll their own hosting quite easily. What you really mean is “user-uploaded videos with ads with the reach of YouTube” but of course there’s only one #1 user-uploaded video website.

[whatshisface]

>but of course there’s only one #1 user-uploaded video website.

That comment makes the issue sound a lot more slippery and ill-defined than it really is. If you're a small content creator, YouTube is your only option. It is actually quite simple; you don't have any plausible way to get people on your website, you won't get any views on Vimeo and you can't monetize it there, and Tiktok won't work unless you're running at most a few seconds. YouTube has a total sector monopoly on doing business with 3Blue1Brown.

[koheripbal]

All you are doing there is broadening the content definition to encompass more players.

The fact that YouTube is a many billion dollar business, and has no DIRECT competition should make it a target for anti-trust action.

[hervature]

I guess we should also be concerned with Tesla’s monopoly on supercharger networks. Just because there is no perfect substitution it does not mean there is no direct competition.

[fennecfoxen]

> YouTube is just one of many services available.

With around 75% market share. Yes, competitor Vimeo exists. Without the aid of the Internet, name a second alternative.

[edoceo]

Self hosted? If you mad about centralization, de-centralize

[yissp]

Peertube

[booleandilemma]

I just visited https://joinpeertube.org/.

This doesn’t look like it’s a solid competitor to YouTube at all.

[barbacoa]

Google ensures YT is pre installed on android phones. They also bias searches towards YT in their search engine. This is classic monopoly behavior; using market dominance in one area to maintain dominance in another. People aren't using YT because they try out the alternatives and decide YT is superior, they are funneled there by google and never know alternatives exist.

[derefr]

On the one hand, you're pointing at these alternative video hosting sites' lack of engaged audience as the problem with switching over to them. On the other hand, you're saying YouTube needs to be forced to allow anyone and everyone to stay on the site — literally, to have a channel at all.

But you're making a very important hidden leap here: between people being allowed to have a channel on YouTube; and those channels being recommended by YouTube's algorithm.

Because it's the YouTube recommendation algorithm that determines whether you get an audience of millions. Without the algorithm, YouTube is just a video hosting platform with some not-very-good search-based discoverability, where you'd need to do your own off-platform SEO to get your videos seen.

Ignoring the discoverability you get through YouTube's algorithm, and assuming you only care about having a video at a URL you can link to from elsewhere, there's literally no benefit to using YouTube over one of those other video-hosts. They all give you a video at a URL.

In a world where YouTube was regulated as a utility, that would presumably involve the video-hosting infrastructure itself being content-neutral. But implicit to that would be a divorcing of the video-hosting component, from the discoverability component. YouTube the video host would be a utility, while YouTube the recommendation engine would be a separate company (not a utility), but only one of many able to run its own indexing and next-to-watch recommendations against the same store of content.

But again, that hidden leap. What's to say YouTube the recommendation engine, divorced from the video-hosting component, wouldn't still end up, through network effects, as the only site people care about? I would think it almost inevitable — especially starting from current conditions where everyone already knows about YouTube, and would still already know about YouTube (the index) after the split.

In such a world, the "public square" of video content — control over what video content most people happen to see by default — would still be controlled by the video-indexing company YouTube. Just like the "public square" of web content is controlled by the web-indexing company Google. Google never had to host the web, to end up with a degree of control over its public-visible curation.

In that world, does your demand for regulation still stand? If so, what does it mean? Would you demand the index itself to be regulated? Does that mean it would then be the government's job to define content moderation rules for YouTube's index? Would the government have to spend man-centuries or more on auditing for YouTube's approach to content moderation, to ensure they're following the rules as laid out? Or what?

[paulpauper]

youtube is more than the recommendation algo:

1. the community

2. user friendly interface

3 faster video loads, better quality, smoother playback compared to competitors

[TeeMassive]

> Neither of those have even half the creators as Youtube.

> Youtube is a monopoly and needs to be regulated as such.

I don't think this is the right argument against big tech in general. "They are more popular" when it comes to entertainment and when there are other ways to share content that people willingly refuse to use just doesn't demonstrate a clear abuse in my opinion.

The most convincing I have seen is when public officials are using them to communicate directly with their constituents (have you seen a government ad on BitChute, Parler, Minds or Gab?) and when they coordinate to ban competitors, collude directly with government officials (wink wink Fauci wink wink Zuckerberg) and when they suppress information and people that are not in line with the main institutional narratives.

And personally billionaires with a messianic complex just creeps me out.

[rejectedandsad]

Fascists that used Gab and 8chan to publish their manifestos before killing creep me out far more than Zuckerberg ever has.

[TeeMassive]

Because mass-killers never used other means of communications to publish their manifestos before and they were always fascist and were never motivated by other ideologies.

[aurizon]

If you used your electricity to kill people by electrocution, what would the authorities do? So if you suggest weak/indecisive/unknowledgeable people avoid vaccination for measles/smallpox/covid/polio are you sugesting they kill themselves? Should the authorities take action? A parent whose child dies from one of these diseases might differ. Measles has a 2% death risk, smallpox 30%, covid 0.5%, polio ~~25% paralysis of symptomatic cases. Back when Columbus came here, measles had a 50% death rate as there was near zero herd immunity, now we have it and death and severe stuff is~2%

[tpush]

YouTube is not a monopoly and you do not have any right to any kind of creators or audience at all.

If McDonald's mistreats you, and every other restaurant tastes like garbage to you: tough titty, but that doesn't provide grounds for the govt. to regulate McDonald's.

[Karunamon]

We decide whether those grounds exist or not.

[tpush]

I don't know what point you're arguing here. Presently these grounds very obviously don't exist, and are also very unlikely to exist in the future.

[Karunamon]

>Presently these grounds very obviously don't exist

Which is irrelevant when discussing how we'd like to update the laws.

[fennecfoxen]

The Herfindahl-Hirschman index on Youtube is easily in excess of 5,000 points... and you don't think it counts as a monopoly at all? What a high bar.

[yhoneycomb]

Agreed, but I think at this point the US government is too drunk on power that it'll never give up the control it has on its citizens through Youtube.

And people say the US is the land of the "free." What a joke.

[davidwu91]

Youtube is owned by a private entity that regularly exerts influence on the government, but it is not the government itself. The favoritism afforded to companies like Youtube is due to changing antitrust laws, and the rise of free market fundamentalism in the US, more than anything else.

The notion that the state is is favorable to Youtube because it wants exert some kind of control over people is true; the nature of that control, however, is fundamentally oligarchical, rather than cultural or whatever is being implied here.

[infamouscow]

In other words, YouTube is right. If you disagree you are wrong.

[koheripbal]

There is a clear blurring of gov't / Google.