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I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strike

I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strikes me as a larger free speech issue than our current system. I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Probably, as it would have fewer conflicts of interests and relationships with foreign dictatorships. ...but ideally, we would have multiple YouTube competitors, that would allow content creators vote with their choice to use Google.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    YouTube has multiple competitors. One of them is even a heavyweight - Facebook. Did you not realise that Facebook hosted videos? Maybe you're unaware that Instagram has Instagram TV section...
- christophilus 6y ago
  This is the reason I really hope we see an uptick in distributed applications.
- acituan 6y ago
  We don’t know, because right now youtube is one black box in Google’s finance sheets. We don’t know if it is a loss leader, which I think is very likely. Imagine youtube was a separate company that always ran in the red and another private company solely footed their bill. Would you trust YouTube’s neutrality then? Wouldn’t that explicate why competition is having difficulty emerging? Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.
  - awa 6y ago
    Google started breaking out youtube numbers in their recent quarterly results (once sundar became Alphabet CEO)
    - acituan 6y ago
      That is only the revenue, which is mostly meaningless because most of the revenue is disbursed to content creators. We also don’t know how much the whole system costs to run.
      - koheripbal 6y ago
        I bet even Google doesn't really know. It's pretty hard to break out cost numbers within a company with so many shared services.
        progre 6y ago
        Oh, they know. They have to know server utilisation to be able to bill their cloud customers and I bet they have even better data for themselves.
        thu2111 6y ago
        That's not the same thing. They had detailed server utilisation data when I was there years ago, and they had models that tried to translate that into some sort of dollar cost, but that didn't mean they really knew. You probably can't know. The ground truth would be if YouTube were spun out and had to rent its infrastructure from Google directly via Google Cloud. But GCloud doesn't actually sell the infrastructure they use, as far as I know - for instance the search engine, the ads engine, the anti-abuse engines, Borg, the edge networks. AFAIK most of the stuff that YouTube relies so heavily on isn't actually available to buy at any price. Pricing is hard work, too. What price should Google charge to license out their search engine tech for competing video sites? There's no existing market for that kind of tech that could provide an obvious price point. For an integrated operation like Google/YouTube you can't ever truly say if it's profitable or not. The division of costs and benefits will always be rather arbitrary.
- akira2501 6y ago
  > Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests? You would almost certainly need something like the Paramount Consent Decrees to structure the marketplace correctly and to foster the kind of competition that would prevent a single player from being in such a vulnerable position.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?

koheripbal 6y ago
Probably, as it would have fewer conflicts of interests and relationships with foreign dictatorships. ...but ideally, we would have multiple YouTube competitors, that would allow content creators vote with their choice to use Google.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  YouTube has multiple competitors. One of them is even a heavyweight - Facebook. Did you not realise that Facebook hosted videos? Maybe you're unaware that Instagram has Instagram TV section...
christophilus 6y ago
This is the reason I really hope we see an uptick in distributed applications.
acituan 6y ago
We don’t know, because right now youtube is one black box in Google’s finance sheets. We don’t know if it is a loss leader, which I think is very likely. Imagine youtube was a separate company that always ran in the red and another private company solely footed their bill. Would you trust YouTube’s neutrality then? Wouldn’t that explicate why competition is having difficulty emerging? Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.
- awa 6y ago
  Google started breaking out youtube numbers in their recent quarterly results (once sundar became Alphabet CEO)
  - acituan 6y ago
    That is only the revenue, which is mostly meaningless because most of the revenue is disbursed to content creators. We also don’t know how much the whole system costs to run.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      I bet even Google doesn't really know. It's pretty hard to break out cost numbers within a company with so many shared services.
      - progre 6y ago
        Oh, they know. They have to know server utilisation to be able to bill their cloud customers and I bet they have even better data for themselves.
        thu2111 6y ago
        That's not the same thing. They had detailed server utilisation data when I was there years ago, and they had models that tried to translate that into some sort of dollar cost, but that didn't mean they really knew. You probably can't know. The ground truth would be if YouTube were spun out and had to rent its infrastructure from Google directly via Google Cloud. But GCloud doesn't actually sell the infrastructure they use, as far as I know - for instance the search engine, the ads engine, the anti-abuse engines, Borg, the edge networks. AFAIK most of the stuff that YouTube relies so heavily on isn't actually available to buy at any price. Pricing is hard work, too. What price should Google charge to license out their search engine tech for competing video sites? There's no existing market for that kind of tech that could provide an obvious price point. For an integrated operation like Google/YouTube you can't ever truly say if it's profitable or not. The division of costs and benefits will always be rather arbitrary.
akira2501 6y ago
> Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests? You would almost certainly need something like the Paramount Consent Decrees to structure the marketplace correctly and to foster the kind of competition that would prevent a single player from being in such a vulnerable position.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]