I wonder whether or not the brand and legal credibility of e.g. YouTube will give them enough leverage to someday "crowdsource" the infrastructure with similar

I wonder whether or not the brand and legal credibility of e.g. YouTube will give them enough leverage to someday "crowdsource" the infrastructure with similar tech, but not defederate, leaving data accessible to the users. Or whether they will need to go the WhatsApp route of closing a federated system(YouTube would do this through drm and an encrypted protocol I guess).