[bko]

Exactly. It's bizarre to me that there's this idea of "fairness" that we have to purposely degrade a great product just so others can create a bad (but now relatively less bad) product, to stick it to Alphabet. Wasn't anti-monopoly policy supposed to benefit the consumer and not the corporations that are just behind the #1 product?

[milesrout]

Antitrust/competition law was originally aimed at improving competition because anticompetitive conduct harmed competitors. Over the 20th century it evolved. Today it is squarely aimed at benefit to consumers long term. But that can be long: if anticompetitive subsidising makes things cheaper but kills competitors then (1) there will be low investment in the market, leading to less consumer surplus in the future and (2) there is the potential to abuse the resulting market power in the future.

I don't know that anyone wants to make YouTube worse to improve competition. The allegation is that YouTube is subsidised by other Google ventures so as to drive other competitors out and that it abuses its market power to harm competition. That doesn't ultimately benefit consumers in the long term.

But I have no idea if any of that is actually true. Maybe YouTube is just better designed and developed and has natural network effects so Google would win even if they didnt do anything anticompetitive.