| 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? |
1. the community
2. user friendly interface
3 faster video loads, better quality, smoother playback compared to competitors