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Comment by gwright | Hacker News Reader

It is distinctly different because the government can fine me or imprison me if I violate their legal proscriptions. I can't opt out of those restrictions.

If Google blocks my content or otherwise refuses to host my content I have lots of other options. Your assertion that Google is a monopoly is this regard is not accurate.

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If the government censors you, you have other choices as well. You can publish your content in locations outside your government's jurisdiction.

So basically your "imprisonment" qualification on the definition of censorship is completely arbitrary and does not stand up to critical scrutiny.

If your government censors you, and you break the censorship in some way, you put your own personal freedom and economic status at risk. In many countries, you put your own life at risk as well.

If Google takes down my video, and I publish it elsewhere, there's no real risk of anything. Maybe I'll lose my Google account if the video was particularly heinous, but that's about as far as it goes.

The imprisonment qualification is a very real difference.

if my business is forfeit, because it operates on the platform that the government allows to be a monopoly which youtube absolutely is then it serves the same function as a fine, frankly it doesn't matter what my leverage is, as long as it works.

More importantly this doesn't address the concept, which is that it's dumb to attach motive to the definition of a problem. It's important when assessing criminal liability, but if you're just using it as an excuse to ignore the detrimental effects of censorship, which haven't changed, just because the mechanisms have, then you're just being profoundly counterproductive.

> if my business is forfeit

Forfeit is not the right word. Nobody is taking your business away from you, it's just not a profitable business.

> monopoly which youtube absolutely is

That is begging the question. There are plenty of sites that let you share video like youtube[0]

[0] http://www.freemake.com/blog/top-7-free-video-sharing-sites/

This is the same argument as the one against net neutrality. So if you your arguments are convincing to you here, then they should be there.

If you own a platform on which other people do business which is a natural monopoly, you shouldn't be allowed to regulate the content on that platform. Youtube is a natural monopoly. It's fairly obvious that this is so, but I will elaborate anyway.

The value of youtube is the number of people use the site. The number of people on the site encourages people to host their content on that site, more people hosting content on the site encourages more people to use the site. In this situation there will always be exactly one winner.

monopoly is not about being most popular service, it's about being the only supplier of some commodity or service. youtube is not the only supplier of video publishing service, hence it's not a monopoly. users can switch from youtube to another service easily.

users can't easily (and sometimes at all) switch to a different internet provider, which is why net neutrality is important.

you clearly have no idea what a monopoly is.

The dictionary disagrees with you.

http://bfy.tw/BBWT

The commodity that youtube sells is not only the ability to upload a video, it is the access to a network of viewers. It can be argued that due to youtube's network size relative to other video sharing website, it has a monopoly in that regard.

i don't agree. plenty of videos are being watched on facebook, instagram, twitter, etc, not to mention all the asian clones.

youtube just seems to be the most monetized platform for the time being, but i don't think it's anywhere near being monopoly in terms of access to users.

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