How many such stories we have to come across before we as a community come together? Apple and Google's monopolies have to be broken. It's insane that your livelihood depends upon the mercy of one organization.

If they cannot support their customers at the scale at which they operate, they should not be allowed to do business at that scale. Google clearly cannot, and they trivially mow people down, as ruthlessly as any careless driver plowing through a street cart, with no accountability for their actions, and no recourse for the customer.

Yes, they shouldn't be dependent on Alphabet, they should back up their content and diversify platforms, but because we decided to allow monopolization of monetization of the web, and to vigorously encourage the surveillance based adtech of Google and Facebook, they control the full stack and effectively hold audiences hostage; you have to play on their platforms in order to engage with the audience you build, and a vast majority of the consumers of content are ignorant of the roles platforms play. If you leave the platform, you lose the access; if you have multiple channels, you get shadowbans and other soft-penalties to discourage people from being disloyal to Google.

We should have a massive diversity of federated, decentralized platforms, with compatible protocols and tools. People should have to think about CDNs and platforms as little as they think about what particular ISP is carrying their traffic between a server and their home.

There should be a digital bill of rights that curtails the power of platforms in controlling access, reach, and forces interoperability, and eliminates arbitrary algorithmic enforcement, and allow due process with mandatory backout periods giving people the reasonable opportunity to recover digital assets, communicate with audience, and migrate to a new platform.

The status quo is entirely untenable; these companies should not have the power to so casually and arbitrarily destroy people's livelihoods.

It's not really that simple. There are already alternative video hosting and streaming sites. In the article it mentions that this creator is already using one in fact. The reason why youtube is such a big deal is because of it's market dominance. Everyone watches there, and therefore it is valuable. "breaking it up" just turns it into another one of the many many competitors that already exist.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Youtube's behavior here. It's bad and shouldn't just be shrugged off. I just don't think that shouting "monopoly!" actually fixes anything. If you want a video hosting and streaming site that has less market dominance and better moderation policies, that already exists. Everyone is free to use them.

These companies have simply too much influence on a global scale for the US to ever kneecap them. For every valid worry the West has of TikTok the exact same argument could be made of YouTube in reverse.

There's some kind of basic theorem about situations like this: doing something about injustice happens at a rate proportional to both (a) the injustice and (b) the ease of doing something about it. The injustice is pervasive (low-level, but constant, and indicative of a situation in which people have unaccountable power over the public). But doing something about it requires a type of organizing that... nobody knows how to do. Or at least nobody remembers how to do. So the barrier to it happening is extremely high.

It's insane that someone's livelihood depends upon the mercy of a "tin can".

This is only the beginning of fucking around and finding out how putting "AI" into everything will create all kinds of problems for humanity.

Relevant Idiocracy clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7THG28GprSM

And do what exactly? Personally I avoid youtube as much as possible, I might watch two or three short videos per month. I also never bought an Apple product save for an ipod years ago. No one needs any of those things.

Or government