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YouTube is a massive platform and inherently has power. People used the exact same argument for Twitter but I don’t think you can deny that arbitrary management

YouTube is a massive platform and inherently has power. People used the exact same argument for Twitter but I don’t think you can deny that arbitrary management choices made a huge difference in how it worked, which had substantial impacts that a private company shouldn’t have.

ncallaway 3y ago
I continue to assert that the solution to this is not to regulate how an individual private company decides who to associate with (which is a core First Amendment right), but rather to pass strong anti-trust laws to prevent any one company from individually having enough power over society. YouTube should be free to decide who can be on its platform however it sees fit. However, YouTube shouldn’t hold such power over us that when they arbitrarily ban someone it severely harms them.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Or just aggressively tax large/high-revenue companies. And speaking of taxing! I'm not sure why highly-successful companies draw so many more "they have too much power" criticisms than highly-successful individuals who often have power over media companies and spend a lot on lobbying politicians.
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    For the broader media ecosystem, we used to have stronger regulations preventing individual entities (be them individuals of corporations) from owning certain percentages of the media ecosystem. I’d be a fan of modernizing that concept, defining social media companies as being a part of the media ecosystem, and lowering that ownership percentage. Force individual social media companies to be broken up into smaller entities, and force a rollback of a lot of the traditional media consolidation.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      It's easy to imagine such things when it relates to owning all the movie theaters or television stations in a given market. But if it's just because people choose to type YouTube into their browser or upload to YouTube over competitors, how do propose to do it?
      - developer93 3y ago
        Well Facebook and Google both have a history of buying competitors, which could be regulated
        vel0city 3y ago
        What competitors has Google/YouTube bought in the last 10 years that would have made a difference in YouTube's seeming dominance if blocked?
      - ncallaway 3y ago
        Sure, a fair question. I would mainly focus on regulating inter-operability, and countering the network effects so that when you have more than a certain share of the media ecosystem you become defined as a “Major Media” organization, and that designation creates additional regulations that you must follow. Some of those would be interoperability focused (so, YouTube could have competitiors that are only attempting to provide a competing front-end and ad-serving business, while being able to take advantage of YouTube’s storage, bandwidth, and video serving at or near cost, similar to how the MVNO’s are allowed to piggyback off the big carriers). Interoperability would be focused on allowing new competitors to reasonably compete with a slice of YouTube, without forcing them to compete with the entire business. The biggest one would be forcing divestment of different aspects of the business. I would allow the data collection apparatus that is Google to own the media company that is YouTube. I wouldn’t allow the ad serving business to be owned by the same entity that is the video distribution and playback company. I wouldn’t allow Google to own any other media properties aside from YouTube. Basically, if you’re a single entity that on its own breaches the ownership threshold, then that single entity becomes the entire business. Everything else must be divested or separated.
  - benj111 3y ago
    I disagree. Brand, or anyone else is getting arbitrarily demonetised and YouTube has too much power. That is the issue. Taxing is that situation is basically just permission for them to carry on doing that, it doesn't fix the problem.
  - developer93 3y ago
    Maybe because they have that power...
- benj111 3y ago
  Either are a solution. Neither are getting implemented though. Judging by the history of the web, there's a very strong tendancy to form natural monopolies, so I'm not entirely sure you can just legislate away their dominance. I'd rather see them classed as common carriers. That can't just arbitrarily ban people from the network.
- 4bpp 3y ago
  Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies, as a hypothetical scenario in which there are dozens of video websites with idiosyncratic communities, rules and technical constraints would add friction that most inhabitants of the current ecosystem would loathe. This arguably makes Youtube more similar to a public transportation service - imagine if New York's MTA having banned Russell Brand from using its services, and your proposed solution were that strong antitrust laws ought to have forced its deconsolidation and return to the '20s setup with the IRT, BRT and IND networks being separate, so a ban from just one of the public transport networks would not be so dramatic to the individual. More generally, I have to say that this commonly held idea of corporations enjoying First Amendment rights does not strike me as a natural or necessary interpretation of the FA; and moreover, it frequently seems to be invoked so selectively that the same people who consider a gargantuan public corporation's right to deny custom at will to be a "core First Amendment right" simultaneously snicker at the invocation of First Amendment rights for private individuals they are politically or morally opposed to, and consider instances of politically or morally motivated rejection of customers by small and completely fungible privately held businesses to be a civil rights issue that should definitively not be decided on a First Amendment basis.
  - phil21 3y ago
    > Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies I'm not entirely convinced. I think it's more "unlimited VC money so platforms could operate at a loss for a decade" had way more to do with entrenching these "natural" monopolies. I recall plenty of social media/video sharing/etc. sites back in the day. I hosted a number of them. They did not die due to lack of popularity, but due to lack of ability to pay for bandwidth and server costs. VC funded folks could just spam money for free, while being told to not even worry about revenue or monetization. This is around the time the word "startup" became a joke - and instead described a vastly funded corporate enterprise vs. a couple guys in a garage. Network effects are certainly a thing, but they are so warped by cheap money and the ability to operate for years at huge losses that I'm not convinced they are as strong as suggested. You had no way to compete with Youtube back then backed by Google money. They effectively had free bandwidth for a decade while they figured things out. Competitors actually had to pay bills and staff with actual revenue. The game was over before it began.

ncallaway 3y ago

I continue to assert that the solution to this is not to regulate how an individual private company decides who to associate with (which is a core First Amendment right), but rather to pass strong anti-trust laws to prevent any one company from individually having enough power over society. YouTube should be free to decide who can be on its platform however it sees fit. However, YouTube shouldn’t hold such power over us that when they arbitrarily ban someone it severely harms them.

majormajor 3y ago
Or just aggressively tax large/high-revenue companies. And speaking of taxing! I'm not sure why highly-successful companies draw so many more "they have too much power" criticisms than highly-successful individuals who often have power over media companies and spend a lot on lobbying politicians.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  For the broader media ecosystem, we used to have stronger regulations preventing individual entities (be them individuals of corporations) from owning certain percentages of the media ecosystem. I’d be a fan of modernizing that concept, defining social media companies as being a part of the media ecosystem, and lowering that ownership percentage. Force individual social media companies to be broken up into smaller entities, and force a rollback of a lot of the traditional media consolidation.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    It's easy to imagine such things when it relates to owning all the movie theaters or television stations in a given market. But if it's just because people choose to type YouTube into their browser or upload to YouTube over competitors, how do propose to do it?
    - developer93 3y ago
      Well Facebook and Google both have a history of buying competitors, which could be regulated
      - vel0city 3y ago
        What competitors has Google/YouTube bought in the last 10 years that would have made a difference in YouTube's seeming dominance if blocked?
    - ncallaway 3y ago
      Sure, a fair question. I would mainly focus on regulating inter-operability, and countering the network effects so that when you have more than a certain share of the media ecosystem you become defined as a “Major Media” organization, and that designation creates additional regulations that you must follow. Some of those would be interoperability focused (so, YouTube could have competitiors that are only attempting to provide a competing front-end and ad-serving business, while being able to take advantage of YouTube’s storage, bandwidth, and video serving at or near cost, similar to how the MVNO’s are allowed to piggyback off the big carriers). Interoperability would be focused on allowing new competitors to reasonably compete with a slice of YouTube, without forcing them to compete with the entire business. The biggest one would be forcing divestment of different aspects of the business. I would allow the data collection apparatus that is Google to own the media company that is YouTube. I wouldn’t allow the ad serving business to be owned by the same entity that is the video distribution and playback company. I wouldn’t allow Google to own any other media properties aside from YouTube. Basically, if you’re a single entity that on its own breaches the ownership threshold, then that single entity becomes the entire business. Everything else must be divested or separated.
- benj111 3y ago
  I disagree. Brand, or anyone else is getting arbitrarily demonetised and YouTube has too much power. That is the issue. Taxing is that situation is basically just permission for them to carry on doing that, it doesn't fix the problem.
- developer93 3y ago
  Maybe because they have that power...
benj111 3y ago
Either are a solution. Neither are getting implemented though. Judging by the history of the web, there's a very strong tendancy to form natural monopolies, so I'm not entirely sure you can just legislate away their dominance. I'd rather see them classed as common carriers. That can't just arbitrarily ban people from the network.
4bpp 3y ago
Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies, as a hypothetical scenario in which there are dozens of video websites with idiosyncratic communities, rules and technical constraints would add friction that most inhabitants of the current ecosystem would loathe. This arguably makes Youtube more similar to a public transportation service - imagine if New York's MTA having banned Russell Brand from using its services, and your proposed solution were that strong antitrust laws ought to have forced its deconsolidation and return to the '20s setup with the IRT, BRT and IND networks being separate, so a ban from just one of the public transport networks would not be so dramatic to the individual. More generally, I have to say that this commonly held idea of corporations enjoying First Amendment rights does not strike me as a natural or necessary interpretation of the FA; and moreover, it frequently seems to be invoked so selectively that the same people who consider a gargantuan public corporation's right to deny custom at will to be a "core First Amendment right" simultaneously snicker at the invocation of First Amendment rights for private individuals they are politically or morally opposed to, and consider instances of politically or morally motivated rejection of customers by small and completely fungible privately held businesses to be a civil rights issue that should definitively not be decided on a First Amendment basis.
- phil21 3y ago
  > Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies I'm not entirely convinced. I think it's more "unlimited VC money so platforms could operate at a loss for a decade" had way more to do with entrenching these "natural" monopolies. I recall plenty of social media/video sharing/etc. sites back in the day. I hosted a number of them. They did not die due to lack of popularity, but due to lack of ability to pay for bandwidth and server costs. VC funded folks could just spam money for free, while being told to not even worry about revenue or monetization. This is around the time the word "startup" became a joke - and instead described a vastly funded corporate enterprise vs. a couple guys in a garage. Network effects are certainly a thing, but they are so warped by cheap money and the ability to operate for years at huge losses that I'm not convinced they are as strong as suggested. You had no way to compete with Youtube back then backed by Google money. They effectively had free bandwidth for a decade while they figured things out. Competitors actually had to pay bills and staff with actual revenue. The game was over before it began.