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.

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cwillu 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> "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.

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MostlyStable 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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conradfr 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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cwillu 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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Ferret7446 a day ago | parent [-]

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 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Show me that law.

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everforward 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a sort of circular problem where basically every creator's videos are on YouTube, but many don't replicate their videos to other video platforms. Viewers won't leave in part because other sites lack content, creators won't cross-post because other sites lack viewers.

Some of that would be alleviated if we separated hosting/serving videos from the frontend and indexing, perhaps with a radio-like agreement on what the host gets paid for serving the video to a customer of the frontend. Frontend/index makes money off ads, and then pays some of that back to the host. Creators could in theory be paid by the video hosts, since views make the host money.

Then heavy handed moderation could be a disadvantage then, because they would be lacking content other sites have (though some of that content would be distasteful enough most frontends would ban it).

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cowpig 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or maybe breaking up YouTube allows for a syndication standard to take its place and we'd get an explosion of value for consumers like we got in podcasting