Zagadka wrote:Again, I see the point of "they are a private company that can do as they please" angle, which I would, again, normally be OK with.
However. Consider if there were one newspa- er, one news source. For everyone. On the planet. Sure, there are smaller outlets, but 80% of the population with access to any news will get it from that source. Even if that source just publishes what people create, their ability to censor at all is a clear monopoly that I can't stand.
We can go back to Ma Bell or the proposed split of Microsoft that never took hold as precedent. That was just over physical phone networks and web browsers. YouTube is far beyond that on a censorship scare level, especially coupled with the rest of Google's services - ubiquitous search domination, reigning popular e-mail provider (both of which farm data) browser market domination, Android market share... etc etc. To ALSO give them sole power over one of the largest media companies on the Internet... that is way beyond what MS was taken to court for.
YouTube is not a monopoly by any stretch.
It is simply arguably the most popular video streaming service.
Google has a video search function, which provides results for multitudes of video streaming services, despite their sole proprietorship over YouTube.
There are many similar streaming platforms out there in the exact same line of business as YouTube, like DailyMotion, Vemio, Baidu, and numerous others, which are both well known and exceedingly accessible (including via the aforementioned Google video search).
There are streaming videos available on news platforms, the facebooks, the VKs, etc., etc.
It is exceedingly simple to embed video which is autonomously hosted on websites, blogs, etc, using encoded videos.
There are also a multitude of specialty and/or subscription based video streaming services out there. I am personally currently subscribed to the FloPro service of FloWrestling, BTN2Go (by the Big Ten Network--for college sports--which I also use to watch wrestling). I likewise catch videos on Fite.tv (including some PPVs from time to time).
And then there are the Netflix, Hulus, Amazon Primes, etc.
YouTube is by no stretch a monopoly, and so your argument really doesn't apply at all, in my view.