Lots of logical leaps here. Utilities haven't been "seized" by the government because there are regulations on them. Telecoms haven't been seized by the govern

Lots of logical leaps here. Utilities haven't been "seized" by the government because there are regulations on them. Telecoms haven't been seized by the government. YouTube has monopoly level dominance in terms of engagement. Competitors can't gain market share because YouTube is already prevalent, and video is a "solved" problem. Consumer gets no benefit by using a different platform, and there is essentially no product feature that could be invented to make an alternative platform compelling enough to use over YouTube. Instead of regulating YouTube, we could define an open database/protocol of video content and allow anybody to build a UI around the same set of content. In that way, there is no network effect gating people into a single platform. This is where things will likely trend in the longer run with social etc. And I would bet the free market will get to it eventually. Then YouTube is just a web UI. And I guarantee you in this world there would be many other widely used sites, as there's no content/network effect lock. Monopolies appear on the basis where it is effectively unreasonable to expect a competitor to form. E.g. railroads. Anybody can build their own railroad. Is it going to happen in practice? No, because cost to do so is prohibitively high.