[acdha]

It’s not that simple: YouTube has a huge natural lock-in because videos use lots of bandwidth and Google’s advertisers are willing to pay for that.

Peer to peer systems struggle to offer a competitive a competitive experience because few people are able/willing to volunteer significant bandwidth or take on the personal liability for serving content which is copyrighted or otherwise illegal. They’ll work okay for a hugely popular video but fall off the cliff for the long-tail of niche interests and there aren’t enough people who care about it enough to make “YouTube but slower and less reliable” work in general.

[coldacid]

Yeah. Essentially, YouTube is all but a natural monopoly given today's legal and technical environment. Unfortunately, it doesn't get the oversight that natural monopolies are supposed to have to prevent abuses like these.

[acdha]

That’s my take as well: regulation and liability for errors are the most realistic way to fix this. Even if ISPs were required to offer symmetric bandwidth I don’t see anywhere near enough people even being interested in serving other people’s content to make P2P work, which makes me feel old for remembering how cool the BitTorrent launch seemed before I understood the social aspects of the problem.