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Comment by frizlab

3 days ago

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.

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frizlab

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jeffbee  3 days ago

Government YouTube: easily the worst idea I've heard in years.

  • frizlab  3 days ago

    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.

    • hagbard_c  3 days ago

      Not at all, commercial television has been a thing for a long time. Government gets involved when deciding who gets to use the limited radio frequency spectrum used to transmit television signals over the ether but it has been possible to offer a wide array of television channels over cable for a long time as well. Government gets involved when deciding who gets to run cables for cable television and tends (or tended) to mandate some specific channels which should be available but those were/are only a small fraction of the available choice.

hagbard_c  3 days ago

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.

nickthegreek  3 days ago

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.