Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody's stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.

This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It's the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.

If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)

My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.

In the mean time, I'll shout "i told you so" from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.