That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.

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asah 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT - if abused then any corporations will have to shut it down...

OTOH I'm 100.0% sure that google has a plan, been expecting this for years and in particular, has prior experience from free Gmail accounts being used for storage.

	▲	justinclift 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT ... Hmmm, isn't the "free-ness" of YouTube because there were determined to outspend and outlast any potential competitors (ie supported by the Search business), in order to create a monopoly for then extracting $$$ from? I'm kind of expecting the extracting part is only getting started. :(

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agnishom 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are right, but YouTube is also a massive repository of human cultural expression, whose true value is much more than the economic value it brings to Google.

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anjel 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So was Flickr

	▲	ancillary 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Somebody wrote a file encoder to take advantage of Flickr's free photo storage, too (though based on its Github repo I don't think a ton of people used it): https://alexcbecker.net/projects.html#storing-data-in-gifs

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komali2 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, but it's a classic story of what actually happened to the commons - they were fenced and sold to land "owners."

Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.

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agnishom 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This seems like a narrow understanding of value.

Which do you think has more value to me? (a) I save some money by exploiting the storage loophole (b) The existence of a cultural repository of cat videos, animated mathematics explainers, long video essays continue to be available to (some parts of) humanity (for the near future).

	▲	komali2 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is assuming doing A has any meaningful impact on B. Anyway in this situation it's less that YouTube is providing us a service and more, it's captured a treasure trove of our cultural output and sold it back to us. Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical. If YouTube goes away, we'll replace it - PeerTube or other federated options are viable. The loss of the corpus of videos would be sad but not catastrophic - some of it is backed up. I have ~5Tb of YouTube backed up, most of it smaller channels. I agree generally with you that the word "value" is overencompassing to the point of absurdity though. Instrumental value is equated with moral worth, personal attachment, and distribution of scarcity. Too many concepts for one word.

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cheonn638 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries?

Exactly which countries could they buy?

Let me guess: you haven’t actually asked gemini

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cheschire 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you? Assuming Google would want to not put all their chips on that one number and invest all available capital in the purchase of a nation, and assuming that nation were open to being purchased in the first place (big assumption; see Greenland), Google is absolutely still in a place to be able to purchase multiple smaller countries, or one larger one.

	▲	arcticfox 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Greenland already has a wealthy benefactor, I'd be surprised if poor countries wouldn't be interested

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gregoryl 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

	▲	K0balt 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You don’t have to go ballistic!

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RobotToaster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nauru, possibly Tuvalu.

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russfrank 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The USA.

	▲	justinclift 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That one's not a "could" as it's already been done. ;)

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szundi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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