Comment by jeffbee
3 days ago
Explain how that would work. YouTube cannot exist without Google. It gets a free ride on Google infrastructure, software, and R&D including custom silicon. If it had to pay nondiscriminatory prices for network, compute, and storage then it simply would not exist. I can't see how that benefits the consumer.
Youtube can buy those services from google as an independent entity, like everybody else. Not profitable enough? Good. I see a lot of people who don't understand that is not a side effect, but the point of antitrust action, to destroy business models that are only competitive as loss leaders for another arm of the monopoly business. Finally we'd get closer to fair competition between video platforms.
It's not a loss leader. It makes a huge amount of money, but only because of its tight integration with Google infrastructure. It is not an abuse of a monopoly any more than it would be for an oil refinery to sell both diesel fuel and petrol.
It makes that money because it gets that infrastructure at cost instead of having to pay for it.
Because that type of service should not come from a private entity. In an ideal world our taxes would pay for these services and the government would provide video hosting. Same goes for map business searching and co BTW. This must not be from a private entity. But it is, because the government is not competent to do it.
Government YouTube: easily the worst idea I've heard in years.
And the fact that it is a bad idea (I agree, it is!) says a lot about the trust we have in the government and their competency, sadly…
That being said, it’s basically TV before the internet.
1 reply →
That ideal world you're referring to is called Utopia and its spectre has been haunting the world for more than a century.
> This must not be from a private entity
The way it stands this sentence does not make sense. Rephrase it slightly and it makes a lot of sense: this must not be from a single private entity. There should be several, preferably many private entities offering such services.
In a truly ideal world everyone would be able to host a video service because there would be essentially unlimited bandwidth, with several competing indexing services providing discoverability. In a slightly less ideal but more achievable world people would still get to run their own services, discoverability would still be provided through competing indexers and the lack of bandwidth would be solved through some sort peer to peer mechanism. The only way in which the government should be involved is in upholding the law of the land by prosecuting those who break said law. That's it, really.
Nothing is keeping congress from creating and managing a citizen video hosting service for its people. The US government does after all allow competition against the United States Postal Service. What they shouldn't do is annex existing platforms.
> Because that type of service should not come from a private entity.
Why?