[cwillu]

> "breaking it up" just turns it into another one of the many many competitors that already exist.

That's very much the point: collaring and tranquilizing the 900 pound gorilla in the room so that the reasons people might have to interact with the 30 other monkeys become relevant.

[MostlyStable]

Except that that still doesn't fix the problem. This behavior is downstream of bad laws and regulations. Do you think that Youtube wants to delete a random channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers? No, that is obviously against it's interests. However, dealing with copyright law in intelligent, nuanced way is too expensive and difficult at scale, and so they resort to these very bad methods. There is a reason that they are probably the only profitable ad-supported platform. Right now, copyright holders aren't focusing on any of the other platforms because 99% of all activity is on youtube. If youtube went away, and the traffic was split up among the other competitors, the same bad dynamics would suddenly get pointed at them, and in 5-10 years we'd be having the same conversation.

You need to address the underlying causes of this kind of behavior.

[conradfr]

What constitutes "too expensive" for a company making more than $30B per year in profits?

[cwillu]

Nobody forced google to maintain a single coherent identity for users across all their services, such that a ban on one service risks impacts to several unrelated ones.

[Ferret7446]

Yes, the law does. The legal risk from someone doing something bad on one service, and then again on another service, and then having to explain to the court why they didn't fully ban a bad actor is not worth it.

[cwillu]

Show me that law.