Imagine There's No YouTube
jchrisa.net
jchrisa.net
First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anything, let alone "civilians", so billions of web servers on the edge of the network is simply a no-go unless and until doing so becomes appliance-esque (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).
Second, 99% of users and cumulative usage time is spent consuming, not producing stuff.
Third, this is just crazy:
"""The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about."""
There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.
I remember in my freshman year of college when students discovered the library sharing feature in iTunes. Word spread pretty quickly, and soon most folks were using their laptops to do what the Zune tried to popularize: sampling the music of peers for free over the network in order to connect over musical taste and find new bands. I think what the author points out is that other programs have similar features (such as iPhoto being able to share a folder of images to the network), but they are limited to local networks and can't be reached from everywhere. Why not institute a system that allows that same "share my photos" check box to make them available on the web? Then I, and many of my friends who have faced the same problem, won't have to create a facebook account just to be able to see a friend's wedding pictures...
The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff.
If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc.
So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.
I also want to use it for things like storing scanned images and possibly home automation/monitoring.
In short there might be a market niche for a low-power headless server to solve this kind of situation
Really, what would happen if content providers will be held liable for uploaded content? The megasites like Youtube couldn't legally exist. And the author argues that this is maybe not a bad thing, which is quite a fresh view of the issue.
Let's use this analogy. Imagine someone was able to build automated mega pub, where anyone could come and buy beer from robot innkeeper. But the pub would be such huge, that it won't be humanly possible to check if everyone was legally allowed to drink alcohol. So the owner would say: We have so much customers that it is not within our means to check if everyone is of 18+ age. So let's anyone go in and drink beer, and if we are notified that someone is underage, we will promptly kick him off. But we are not liable, since there should be a freedom to drink beer. So what do you think - would such a pub be allowed to exists in a real world? So then, why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone can do illegal things anonymously there? (Of course that was just a reasoning exercise, I am not advocating Youtube ban here. ;-)) But overall, I tend to agree with the author, good article.
Youtube is not a pub selling beer. They are a virtual location that allows any artist to hang their work. They benefit by selling space for advertisements around the booths. When notified of an artist showing an illegal or otherwise unacceptable piece, they remove it. I see this as a perfectly reasonable situation.
The metaphor used in interacting with websites is that of a place. I think the metaphor is a good one.
Hosting a space for other people to use should not make one de facto guilty if others abuse it. One could argue for negligence if they had no reporting system or ignored it. But so far as I have read, this is not the case.
On Amazon, your content is at http://example.com/ . Your domain. Your site.
This is not about content. If YouTube allowed any content, that wouldn't change anything. If Amazon would only allow videos (but let you have your domain name), that wouldn't change anything either.
If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.
By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current regime. :-)
Censoring YouTube is a blow against free speech. Generally we should prefer YouTube to the government here. However the interests of free speech and YouTube are not identical either. They may resist government censorship, but they also censor content for their own purposes.
The ideal of free speech, in his view, is not that we have giant private sharing infrastructures (or even competition among them). In his ideal world, there would be common sharing / hosting / backup infrastructure, so distributed and fine grained that it would be simply everywhere.
Also craigslist would obviously fall under a the youtube designtion -- and other such services that require scale.
In the case of EC2, Amazon owns the building, and lets a space to you, to do with more or less what you will. If that happens to be running a bar that serves underage drinkers, how is that their responsibility?
Edited to add: Except, of course, in the case where they've been notified that you are, in fact, serving underage customers. Most leases have verbiage that allows the lessor to break the agreement and boot your ass if you're using the space to break the law. That's how they qualify for safe harbor.
The only difference between YouTube and Amazon EC2 is flexibility of purpose. You can do many different things with an EC2 account because it was designed to let you do those things. You can upload videos to a YouTube account and not much more because YT was designed to do one thing well.
What they have in common is that they are both hosting services and apps platforms. They both host your data and applications. The fact that the "window" into EC2 from the outside is whatever the account holder wants it to be, whereas the window into YT is just YT's interface... is totally irrelevant.
The bottom line is that both Amazon and YouTube are hosting your data on their servers, and allowing you to present that data to the public at large. If one of them is responsible for legality of your content, then both of them must be.
So profit = bad? Do you think that Amazon runs EC2 as a pro-bono effort?
Amazon YouTube
------ -------
Rents Generic Space Rents specific space (videos-only)
Charges Rental Fees Free rent
Provides a minimal API Provides a nice web front-end tailor to specific space
Profits from rental fees Profits from adverts in/around the videos
[Note: I've never used EC2 so I don't know what they provide other than a low-level (and maybe a high-level) API into their space]
{edit} Some more points:
* If you don't like that fact that YouTube does not rent generic space and rents space specifically for videos, then how do you rectify more to-the-metal type services that rent space specifically for video, or music distribution, but still profit from rental fees (instead of ads)? Do they qualify the same as YouTube because they are not providing 'generic space?'
* Do you not like that Google possibly profits more from popular videos than from unpopular videos (i.e. you don't like that they profit more or less based on the content of the video)? If this is the case, how is it any different than Amazon EC2 profiting more from someone that serves large files that such up copious amounts of bandwidth if they get to be popular/highly downloaded? {/edit}
I need an emoticon indicating total bafflement.
The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions.
> There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.
But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.
This is wrong. I think the internet would be a better place if it were easier for people to run their own servers, but that doesn't mean we should make it more difficult for hosted services to operate.
Take Facebook for example, why couldn't we just have a number of providers of social networking services with an agreed-upon protocol to communication/authentication between them? Then I could run my own server for my profile/albums/etc while someone less tech-savvy could sign up with a ready-to-go service that pays for itself with ads.
I feel there is a disconnect with the 'landlord' analogy here. The author feels that the 'landlord' is the hardware/internet connection provider/host, while the grandparent poster feels that the YouTube also qualifies as a 'landlord' that is renting out space for people to display their videos (where the 'rent' is the ability to display adverts).
The question, then, should be what do we do in the mean time? Would shutting down the YouTubes of the world actually hasten the advent of server appliances? I'm skeptical.
I also have trouble imagining how new social networking-type applications spread in a world where we have personal servers. The next YouTube/Facebook/Whatever will now have to write their software for a variety of different home servers (and there almost certainly will be a moderate-to-large number of incompatible devices), then convince people to install and correctly configure these apps, update them somewhat regularly to fix security holes, etc. Given the non-zero fraction of people who have trouble simply logging into Facebook, I think we're still a long ways off, and stand to benefit from the rich communities provided by simple, corporate-run networks.
Take this safe harbor thing. Let's say that it becomes abolished for sites like YouTube across the board. Do you think Google would say "oh too bad, time to shut down the site". Of course not. Google has the money to pay for a million mechanical-turk style people to view every video, and the innovative prowess to create programs that would do filtering as well. The end result would be that they would probably err on the side of being too cautious, and we'd have a YouTube with far less content.
However, the true problem here is that if I now wanted to compete with YouTube, it would be impossibly difficult due solely to the liability of it all. I can't afford to have a huge staff looking at every video, or massive servers running analysis on every upload. So all of a sudden what you've done is SOLIDIFY YouTube's stranglehold on content.
Not to mention that you've all of a sudden given Google the perfect excuse for denying any content they want, they can now just hide behind "liability concerns". We've already seen that companies abuse DMCA takedowns with fair use, of course there would be abuse of this as well.
It's not about making a competing service, its about self-service.
More serious is the apparent blitheness with which the author assumes that only big companies will be affected by speech regulations. On the contrary, it's normally small operators who are intimidated into shutting down by speech regulations like DMCA or the late, unlamented COPA. The Google in Italy case is newsworthy precisely because the government there bullied an entity with the resources to try to fight back.
Now, am I happy to let Google fight legal battles that I agree with that I can't fight on my own, due to lack of resources and standing? Yes.
If Italy is fine with lolcats on YT, presumably they'd be fine with lolcats on my home server.
The video is not the harm; the original taunting is. If it's a manner of protecting a minor, we can talk about pulling the video down.
If the kids were selling the video and making money off it, we can talk about prosecuting them.
Despite his having a couple of degrees in anthropology and talking about this long before Avatar was ever in theaters... I remain unconvinced. Even without all the mundane problems of modern life, most of us in the developed world don't have to worry about our immediate survival on a day-to-day basis. Society may have made an enormous number of tradeoffs to get to where we are, but I still have to call it a net positive.
That's kind of how I feel about this article.
Neither do hunters and gatherers. Turns out that hunter gatherers (at least the ones surveyed) just sit around most days and rarely worry about their immediate survival either. If you're interested in more information, this is a seminal work for anthropologists studying this topic:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
I would agree that, for me, life in modern society is a net positive, but that is a personal decision shaped by my own cultural biases. Is modern society inherently better than a hunter gatherer one? No, I don't think so.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text
Again, if modern society was inherently better, why are there modern hunter gatherers at all? Shouldn't they all have joined us by now? It is not for lack of opportunity. They like their culture and their lifestyles. They don't want to join us as much as we don't want to join them.
This case could also help many torrent sites to survive http://torrentfreak.com/can-google-secure-a-safe-haven-for-b... . Where I live there is no netflix, no itunes, no hulu. And most people wouldn't have the money for those anyway. So torrent sites play a great role in democratizing culture (good and bad culture I know).
Sounds like fairly straightforward neo-luddite snobbery to me, the same kind of thinking that made all those Whole Foods customers so angry at Wal-Mart for selling organic vegetables. I think his real agenda is that he wants to turn back the clock to before the Eternal September and take us back to a geek-only internet. I think he resents all of the ordinary people and their cat videos.
Also, no fully peer-to-peer architecture can serve content with low enough latency for web browsing (as Freenet so ably demonstrates) and none ever will because of Parkinson's Law, but that's largely beside the point.
Why exactly where these people charged with anything? What kind of ridiculous law is this? I feel this has less to do with free speech and internet freedom than it does with common sense.
This would kill hacker news and a large number of other sites, and is not solved by self-hosting.
</sarcasm>If you reversed that, with commentors posting comments with links to the post, you'd then need aggregation to read comments, making aggregator sites and software makers vulnerable.
It doesn't really stop until we devolve down to a pre-search engine web. But since "we" will be reshaping things, that'll be all good, right?
But I can't see anything positive in the decision of the Italian court. Remember this is Italy. It's Berlusconi's country. And the guy is hellbent on eradicating independent media. He won't stop at shutting down Youtube.
Being able to anonymously publish stuff is a very important aspect of the freedom of speech!
But the aggregators exist because the content consumers want consistency, ease of discovery and all the admin heavy lifting done for them ...
A landlord who leases his premises to the bar owner for a fixed sum per month is not responsible for the behavior of drunk customers. He's just renting the premises. But the bar owner who makes money on the drinks should be responsible.
The law should assign responsibility to Youtube in a similar way. If Youtube is merely a "landlord" it should not be held responsible for copyright infringement. If, however, it profits from the individual videos that are uploaded, it's hard to see why it should not also bear the loss caused by copyright infringement.
On that note, clearly we should just launch a satellite that beams youtube videos to everyone. Since shooting down a satellite is illegal under various international laws, this should be a safe place to host your autotuned lolcats.
definitely independant music would be way behind where it is now.
What we should build is a universally accepted protocol for government policing. Every UGC website must implement it. The government gets some police accounts which they can use to block objected content. Every government manages their jurisdiction. There can be treaties and smart organizations like NSA who do things automatically.
May be futuristic, but it will happen.
There would be guidelines and you could take them to court for breaking them. There will be new sections in the law and new court judgments to base actions upon. It would evolve. Let there be a special department trained and specialized in this.
All I am saying is pass the onus to government and give them a way to do it.
1) "Hating facism is too cliche"
2) "waaahhhh-big-evil-corporations"
3) "I miss animated GIFs and rainbow borders, grandma needs to handcraft an impossible-to-find-pre-web1pointOh site for her cat videos and not use EvilTube. Will be way cool."