I preface this with the understanding that this is probably a stupid idea, mired in legal precedents and ramifications, undesirable restrictions and possibly (I don't honestly know) the potential to give special interests even MORE power over the platform... but hear me out.
The majority of YouTube's issues stem from it being privately owned. We've known for a long time that Google has had an impossible time turning a profit on the platform. They probably would have dropped it years ago if they didn't have an entire market cornered, with no notable competitors, with a service that is culturally indispensable and defines much of the Internet at large.
This has led to so many of their bad decisions, especially in regard to their infamous lack of oversight and backing of copyright owners over those who ought to be legally protected. YouTube cultivated a new and booming industry of independent content creation, and now that it's determined to muscle out all but the biggest of those success stories, they carry the fate of that industry in their hands.
Government seizure of the platform seems like the kind of solution this problem screams for. Video streaming and creation is too ingrained in society to be left in the hands of a private body. Subsidizing essential public services that don't turn a profit is one of the roles of government. It's why only government funding gets us any closer to space travel or why anyone researches fusion energy. If they didn't, nobody ever would, because it's not profitable.
Not to mention this would finally eliminate the copyright issues, because the government has to follow its own damn laws and not cower before private owners with money.
Of course I also recognize the issue that YouTube has servers across the globe, so you could argue those would be an issue in turning into a US government arm in other countries...
...but mostly I'd just like to hear people's thoughts, or whether a lesser notion or more elegant solution might be proposed. Because all I hear about is the problems, and nobody has ever given a solution that doesn't involve a nonexistent competitor or the bandaid fix that is Patreon funding.
Yes and also no
It'd be better for the DMCA and copyright and all those other laws to be rewritten by people who aren't 500 year old lumps of out of touch moss
Gov seizure would also have no guarantee of solving these things, and could even be an absolute nightmare potentially which makes matters thousands of times worse.
The issue stems from the law itself, and the fact that there is literally zero consequence to ABUSING the system. The issue here isn't capitalism, it's old fucks that don't understand the internet and don't care.
As little as i trust youtube, i'd trust it in the hands of the state even less.
It's already being selectively moderated politically in private hands, now imagine putting that in the hands of people with zero profitability motivation, and every incentive in the world to pervert the public forum for their own political interests. Not just candidates in influetntial positions wanting to put forward issues convenient to their position, and nuke politically inconvenient topics. But think about anonymous lobbyists with even worse motivations, and even less scruples.
And that's before you even get to the technical conciderations. If the US turned youtube into a state run enterprise, how would that work in international territorry? Every two bit tin hat dictator from Xi to Maudro would nuke that shit from orbit, and worse, contest youtube as an international state entity. Holding the US accountable for actions of it's users. Let alone our own leaders who question weather open platforms of that type should exist at all. (hello article 17.)
“We all have legal obligations to fulfill. If you have a massive platform like YouTube you will have to use a technological solution. Everyone has these obligations. They have created a business model with the property of other people – on copyright protected works. If the intention of the platform is to give people access to copyright protected works then we have to think about whether this kind of business should exist. The new legislation is improving the situation for the European creators industry.”
And that's just assuming that they could even functionally operate the fucking thing. Have you seen a goverment website? They make filing paperwork a fucking kafkhaesque nightmare and you expect them to run one of the most technically complicated web services in the world?
The solution is actually just the opposite. The problem is that yes, youtube is a device with which to communicate, functionally analogous to the legal concept of the town soap box. Its become an intractable cornerstone of modern content, diologue, news, etc. Really every part of anything pretaining to communication and the exchange of information is touched by youtube and other such platforms. And increasingly, it's being treated not as the vehicle through which that travels, similar to phone or mail service, but a product of itself, for which its parent is impossibly accountable for. Toutube themselves started operating like a curated service, which i think is what was the first broken window that started the landslide in the first place with Adpocolypse v1. Despite the fact that it operated basically ideally before that.
The solution therefore is less regulation, and to treat those platforms for what they are. Fucking platforms. Devices which serve as a service for people to use, and for those people to be accountable for what they do, not the service. A phone company isn't responsible for criminals organizing criminal acts with their phones, and mail companies aren't responsible for not delivering impossibly anonymous mail bombs, so why is youtube responsible for joeblow1996 for saying a bad word? Or for XXPolitiFuckerXX having bad opinions?
The DMCA was an excellent solution in this regard. If someone did something bad that a copyright holder didn't like, they could take it the fuck up with the person who did it, and not youtube themselves. There was nothing wrong with that (beyond being kinda impotent at large scales), and everything wrong with the alternitive (which is why article 17/11/18/whatever is such a fucking disaster). To undertake the active curation of all content (which is what they've dedicated themselves to on principal) on a service where something like 40 hours of content is uploaded every minute is technically impossible. And worse still, it's assuming that the natural ecosystem driven by people watching what they want is wrong. It's assuming that people's own inclinations cant be trusted, and shouldn't be trusted. And that's a fucking terrible notion with a strong whiff of authoritarian arrogance that i refuse absolutely.
So in short: No.
Youtube is in a bad place right now but I don't think there's any place bad enough that it could possibly be that I would consider putting the US Government, which is teetering on the edge of complete collapse into corruption and malcompetence due to one of our two political partied being completely out of their fucking minds, in charge of it.
Somehow I knew Facepunch would provide a nuanced, substantive response to the idea. And as an aside, I'm glad to see people understood I heavily suspected it was a bad idea to begin with and didn't rate boxes at me en masse.
I guess as a lefty what you're saying is very unusual to me. Usually LESS regulation isn't a good thing, haha. But I see we agree with the end goal of YouTube being JUST a platform blind to its content and responsible for none of it, with the end user wholly culpable for their own submissions.
It still doesn't answer a chief concern of mine though, which is the fact that Google loses money with YouTube. I just don't see how it can be sustainable for something like this to be managed globally by ONE private entity, especially when it doesn't profit them to do so. I mean, what would happen if YouTube were shut down, servers and all tomorrow? A huge amount of global content from the past decade and a half would vanish in a puff of smoke, sites like Veoh and Dailymotion would crash from the panic of users looking for a viable alternative that doesn't exist. So SO many people would instantly lose their livelihoods. Hell, it could cause a market crash for all I know.
And it would be entirely within Google's legal rights to do so.
The only less extreme option I can think of is to subsidize and incentivize such mass video upload sites against their massive overhead costs, possibly allowing room to foster competition if it stops being such a colossal money sink.
Of course, then you'd have to convince people to forward that kind of money to such a thing, and right wingers and the eldest generations of voters and politicians would look at something like that and see it as hilariously frivolous and " 'doh, those wacky millenials..."
Also, sorry for the late response, I had a few places to drive between Cali, AZ and Vegas the last two days.
Well perhaps i should clarify that as more to the effect of "More state is not a reliable solution".
Frankly i think a setup where some untouchable behomoth like google is undertaking it is basically the only possible solution. And I think the degeneration of the platform is not a fault with that per say, but more its increasingly poor leadership cowtowing to people like Eric Feinberg and the pearl clutching "But muh outrage" machine for no substantive reason whatsoever. And i don't see introducing state intervention to that as having a chance of improving anything, and would most likely only make things worse by giving said pearl clutchers a more ready avenue to hamfistedly molest public platforms through state support, as it would then be subject to public intervention. IE some politician could run on or be persuaded that so and so group needs to be stopped because we can't have a diversity of opinion anymore, or because teenagers might hear bad words, and depending on how deep that government relationship went with youtube, could at the very least threaten to cut the money stream, or at the more extreme ends, forcibly coerce that change.
No matter what, i don't see how that could possibly improve anything, but i see fertile ground for everything to get markedly worse.
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