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This is a really interesting battle of platform vs proprietary business going on here. Is Youtube a platform? If so, then it should be offered to everyone equal
by zmmmmm 14y ago
This is a really interesting battle of platform vs proprietary business going on here. Is Youtube a platform? If so, then it should be offered to everyone equally. That's almost the definition of a platform. But is it actually a proprietary business that operates purely in the interests of its owner? In that case it should be offered to whoever makes money for the owner. If you are a content creator, Youtube tries very hard to look like a platform. But if you are a business that wants to make money from showing the content - Youtube looks like a proprietary business.
Lots of companies are trying to have it both ways these days. Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google too - all want to say, "hey, here we have a platform, you can come and develop here and make money without prejudice". But at the same time they all want to say, "we make the rules, we decide who wins, who loses and who's in and who's out and have no obligation to be fair about it".
Once upon a time people screamed murder when a platform company started weaving its own interests directly into its platform. For example, Microsoft would get heavily criticised for using "secret" windows APIs in office. Not that they didn't. But there was a general consensus that it was highly unfair for MS to have access to APIs that others didn't.
These days this resistance has been broken down by companies like Apple and Facebook, offering incredibly attractive "platforms" but without the guarantees that a platform used to have. Would anybody complain now that Apple uses a private API on the iPhone that 3rd party developers don't have access to? These days people virtually insist on it, for security, if nothing else.
So to me this is one more aspect of this long and winding battle between companies that want to have it all - pretend to offer "open" platforms but keep the reigns under their control. And they are all guilty.
- _pmf_ 14y ago> If you are a content creator, Youtube tries very hard to look like a platform. If you have money, scammers try very hard to look like business partners.
- drewcrawford 14y ago> Once upon a time people screamed murder when a platform company started weaving its own interests directly into its platform. For example, Microsoft When you say "screamed murder", do you mean that people got huffy about it on the Internet? That's still the case. Exhibit A: your comment. Did you mean "antitrust lawsuits used to be filed about it?" A random sampling of any paragraph in the actual court decision should convince you that the situation is not comparable to today: > Microsoft possesses a dominant, persistent, and increasing share of the world- wide market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems. Every year for the last decade, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems has stood above ninety percent. For the last couple of years the figure has been at least ninety-five percent, and analysts project that the share will climb even higher over the next few years. - U.S. v. Microsoft, Findings of Fact If at some point Apple's share of the phone market, or even of the ARM-based phone market, exceeds 90 percent, over a period of a decade--by all means, let's file a lawsuit about it.
- makomk 14y agoI think you're conflating two fundamentally different meanings of the word "platform" here, which is important because the two are almost diametrically opposed. YouTube is a platform for content providers to distribute and monetize their videos. They are not a platform for video application development which harms the intended users of their platform - the content providers - by wrecking their monetization strategies.