YouTube AI error costs creator his channel over alleged link to Japanese account

How many such stories we have to come across before we as a community come together? Apple and Google's monopolies have to be broken. It's insane that your livelihood depends upon the mercy of one organization.

It's not really that simple. There are already alternative video hosting and streaming sites. In the article it mentions that this creator is already using one in fact. The reason why youtube is such a big deal is because of it's market dominance. Everyone watches there, and therefore it is valuable. "breaking it up" just turns it into another one of the many many competitors that already exist.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Youtube's behavior here. It's bad and shouldn't just be shrugged off. I just don't think that shouting "monopoly!" actually fixes anything. If you want a video hosting and streaming site that has less market dominance and better moderation policies, that already exists. Everyone is free to use them.

These companies have simply too much influence on a global scale for the US to ever kneecap them. For every valid worry the West has of TikTok the exact same argument could be made of YouTube in reverse.

There's some kind of basic theorem about situations like this: doing something about injustice happens at a rate proportional to both (a) the injustice and (b) the ease of doing something about it. The injustice is pervasive (low-level, but constant, and indicative of a situation in which people have unaccountable power over the public). But doing something about it requires a type of organizing that... nobody knows how to do. Or at least nobody remembers how to do. So the barrier to it happening is extremely high.

> "breaking it up" just turns it into another one of the many many competitors that already exist.

That's very much the point: collaring and tranquilizing the 900 pound gorilla in the room so that the reasons people might have to interact with the 30 other monkeys become relevant.

And do what exactly? Personally I avoid youtube as much as possible, I might watch two or three short videos per month. I also never bought an Apple product save for an ipod years ago. No one needs any of those things.

Or maybe breaking up YouTube allows for a syndication standard to take its place and we'd get an explosion of value for consumers like we got in podcasting

If they cannot support their customers at the scale at which they operate, they should not be allowed to do business at that scale. Google clearly cannot, and they trivially mow people down, as ruthlessly as any careless driver plowing through a street cart, with no accountability for their actions, and no recourse for the customer.

Yes, they shouldn't be dependent on Alphabet, they should back up their content and diversify platforms, but because we decided to allow monopolization of monetization of the web, and to vigorously encourage the surveillance based adtech of Google and Facebook, they control the full stack and effectively hold audiences hostage; you have to play on their platforms in order to engage with the audience you build, and a vast majority of the consumers of content are ignorant of the roles platforms play. If you leave the platform, you lose the access; if you have multiple channels, you get shadowbans and other soft-penalties to discourage people from being disloyal to Google.

We should have a massive diversity of federated, decentralized platforms, with compatible protocols and tools. People should have to think about CDNs and platforms as little as they think about what particular ISP is carrying their traffic between a server and their home.

There should be a digital bill of rights that curtails the power of platforms in controlling access, reach, and forces interoperability, and eliminates arbitrary algorithmic enforcement, and allow due process with mandatory backout periods giving people the reasonable opportunity to recover digital assets, communicate with audience, and migrate to a new platform.

The status quo is entirely untenable; these companies should not have the power to so casually and arbitrarily destroy people's livelihoods.

Except that that still doesn't fix the problem. This behavior is downstream of bad laws and regulations. Do you think that Youtube wants to delete a random channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers? No, that is obviously against it's interests. However, dealing with copyright law in intelligent, nuanced way is too expensive and difficult at scale, and so they resort to these very bad methods. There is a reason that they are probably the only profitable ad-supported platform. Right now, copyright holders aren't focusing on any of the other platforms because 99% of all activity is on youtube. If youtube went away, and the traffic was split up among the other competitors, the same bad dynamics would suddenly get pointed at them, and in 5-10 years we'd be having the same conversation.

You need to address the underlying causes of this kind of behavior.

There's a sort of circular problem where basically every creator's videos are on YouTube, but many don't replicate their videos to other video platforms. Viewers won't leave in part because other sites lack content, creators won't cross-post because other sites lack viewers.

Some of that would be alleviated if we separated hosting/serving videos from the frontend and indexing, perhaps with a radio-like agreement on what the host gets paid for serving the video to a customer of the frontend. Frontend/index makes money off ads, and then pays some of that back to the host. Creators could in theory be paid by the video hosts, since views make the host money.

Then heavy handed moderation could be a disadvantage then, because they would be lacking content other sites have (though some of that content would be distasteful enough most frontends would ban it).

Counterpoint - I need Youtube Premium because it saves me money on streaming/cable services and I don't get sucked into binge watching things!

What constitutes "too expensive" for a company making more than $30B per year in profits?

Nobody forced google to maintain a single coherent identity for users across all their services, such that a ban on one service risks impacts to several unrelated ones.

Or government

It's insane that someone's livelihood depends upon the mercy of a "tin can".

This is only the beginning of fucking around and finding out how putting "AI" into everything will create all kinds of problems for humanity.

Relevant Idiocracy clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7THG28GprSM

It's not a consumer issue. The fix we would need is laws that are analogous to laws that protect workers from their employers, though that is pretty far away in the current US political economy, and would presumably require creators bringing some kind of organized pressure on Big Tech or their government, analogous to a union.

Apple cannot either. They seem immature when it comes to approving this or that app, or taking ideas (tile) to kill companies.