Comment by ndriscoll

Those companies have been developing hardware with exponential improvements for generations now. They wouldn't have stopped if not for youtube. Youtube and Whatsapp became possible because of them, not the other way around.

Phone companies are literally a concrete, non-theoretical demonstration that call signaling doesn't need to be centralized for a good experience. There's also already XMPP which works like email: you can add your contacts and just start video calls over it just like you can just send emails. It works today. It scales today. You can use it right now, but the monopolists lock everyone into their networks.

Your "counter-example" proves my point: giving youtube away for free canabalizes youtube premium.