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> pedantic

It's not pedantic, it is patently false.

Wikipedia: "Governments and private organizations may engage in censorship"

Merriam Webster: Censor: "a person who supervises conduct and morals"

Dictionary.com: Censor: "any person who supervises the manners or morality of others"

ACLU: "Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups"

Fair enough. The confusion seems to be so common I wonder where it comes from originally. Evidently it's not coming from dictionaries... maybe schools are creating this misconception by primarily discussing government censorship.

I'm guessing it's because of the First Amendment.

I doubt Randall Munroe of XKCD created it, but he certainly popularized it on internet with his free speech comic.

The confusion seems common to America, where the constitution is seen as the source of the rights, rather than as a document referencing pre existing ideals.

Its not confusion, its a specific talking point used to advocate pro-censorship ideology. Arguing against the 1st amendment would be arguing against american values - this conveniently side steps that association.

> the problem is people thinking that censorship is something only a government can do,

It's not. Private companies can attempt to silence people.

But Youtube isn't preventing the creators from hosting content elsewhere. They aren't hitting them with a slapp lawsuit. They aren't colluding with other websites to ban these videos.

Youtube is just saying "host these somewhere else." How is that different from a publishing company choosing not to publish a book?

Well it is a little different. For the reason I mentioned in my post. Because youtube is the only game in town.

> I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem.

The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly.

>"But Youtube isn't preventing the creators from hosting content elsewhere. They aren't hitting them with a slapp lawsuit. They aren't colluding with other websites to ban these videos."

Again, you're not refuting anything that anybody here actually thinks.

>"Well it is a little different. For the reason I mentioned in my post. Because youtube is the only game in town."

Exactly, which is why the devil's advocate routine is so tiring.

>"The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly."

I agree, but how could that actually be accomplished? If the government split up google/youtube like they split Bell, what would go to who? Would one of the Baby Youtube's get the "youtube" domain/brand? Or could they all? Would youtube.com just give you a "web portal" that impartially linked to all the various Baby Youtubes that were created by fracturing youtube? Would third party video websites unrelated to the youtube breakup get a place on that web portal?

> Again, you're not refuting anything that anybody here actually thinks.

And you aren't refuting what I said. How is this any different than a book publisher deciding what books to publish? Are you saying youtube and other websites should be forced to host content they don't agree with? Should HN be held to the same rules? How would that work?

"The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly."

And the way to get that is to start using the alternative sites. If everyone is going to continue to use YouTube to host their videos, nothings going to change.

* >With regard to the rest of your comment, I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn't it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several "Baby Youtubes"? How would that work, which one would get the domain name? *

Not OP, but IMO breaking Google into smaller chunks would increase responsibility on each smaller chunk to provide a pro-customer experience, and require specific (and slower to act) government requests to affect large swathes of data. Smaller corporations simply can't afford to screw users as quickly or in such numbers as mega-groups.

Right now, 'Google' can be asked to affect data for many services? Is that good? It doesn't feel good to me.

Having a large backing company , in nearly every instance i've encountered it, reduces overall customer satisfaction, reduces communications between company and consumer to as bare minimum as possible, and makes the service much more likely to attract, and fold to, government pressure.

It's an important distinction though. One is legally sanctioned censorship by proxy of a defecto monopoly. The other is government enforced.

One has a penalty of shutting you up, the other of shutting you up, fining you, and or jailing you.

They shouldn't be conflated as the same type of censorship.

Nobody here is under the impression that youtube is threatening people with imprisonment. So pointing out the distinction is tiring and pedantic.

YouTube could not survive on its own. YouTube only exists so that Google can guarantee they see no competition in the video space. It loses money by the mountain-load. It is propped up by Google Search and the titanic amounts of money AdSense brings in. If you wanted to build a competitor to YouTube, you would need investors willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure - and willing to accept tremendous losses for potentially decades. Google will continue to prop up YouTube in order to guarantee competent competition will never exist.

Maybe this makes this problem a candidate for nationalization then, but it's questionable at best if that would actually improve the situation (particularly for people residing outside of the country that nationalized it, presumably America.)

I'm just spitballing here, but if Youtube were handed over to the United States Postal Service (which has a reasonable but far from untarnished reputation for being content neutral. probably a better recent track record than google's), maybe that would be an improvement. Using tax dollars to subsidize a content neutral video platform would raise a lot of questions though, no least of which being how to handle monetization so that content producers get paid for what they upload. If the replacement platform can't compensate content producers, I don't think it will succeed. And of course it would also open the platform up to government directed censorship which can have more serious consequences than corporate directed censorship, but on the other hand gives the censored an arguably better chance of rectifying the situation through the courts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_censorship#Countries_kn...)

I don't think nationalization is the answer, but busting up that monopoly probably is.

Google's entire business model seems to be to operate everything as a loss-leader for AdSense. It turns out that that's extremely anti-competitive and I'm growing to think that it probably should be illegal.

The only way that anyone can compete with the free services that Google provides is to run it off the profits from a massive cash cow like AdSense. Until somebody finds some service/revenue model that provides that, it's just not going to happen.

The only way that anyone can compete with AdSense is to own users interactions with the browser like Google's free services do. Until somebody owns that much of your traffic, no-one will compete with AdSense.

But as otakucode points out, the resulting Baby Youtubes from a broken up Youtube probably wouldn't be economically viable. Independent 'Baby Youtubes' would probably be surmounted by another nu-Youtube kicked off by the likes of Facebook or Amazon; companies that could afford to subsidize the platform to out-compete independent video platforms. It would become the Google/Youtube situation all over again. And sure, you could break that one up too, but it would just turn into a truly awful demoralizing game of wack-a-mole.

I'm far from confident that nationalization is the answer, but I don't know what is. I think we're perhaps dealing with a new sort of problem that requires a new sort of solution, that has yet to be devised.

I'm not so certain I agree. For one, I don't think corporations this large should be able to entirely subsidize entire mature businesses (and control them) period. That's the force they exert in the market that's anti-competitive. If an alternative isn't economically viable, than the business just isn't there.

Given the little I know about Facebook's server infrastructure, they don't really have the capability to deliver a "Baby Youtube" anytime soon. They don't have the physical space available for the hardware they'd need and if they did it would rapidly be absorbed by their larger teams who need it already. Plus they just don't do high quality video well. That combined with the visibility limitations of the feed don't really make it a great platform for self-branding, unless you're willing to shell out major cash for promotion.

Amazon makes more sense as Twitch is already a good analogue for Youtube. It also pairs well with their budding media empire. That said, Twitch actually brings in money -- it doesn't depend entirely on subsidy to function.

I think what I'm getting at, ultimately, is that hosting your own video content probably shouldn't be free. I'm sort of tonedeaf to complaints over the streaming Adpocalypse because these streamers/person-brands exist purely through advertising subsidy in the first place. If the quality of your content is good, it's worth paying for distribution (and/or self-hosting) because you will see a return.

So it turns out that Vimeo is probably the right choice. Reviewing their content guidelines, it seems as though most of the commercial content that has been kicked off other platforms fine as long as it isn't spammy or sexually explicit.

Or, just start hosting your stuff at the alternative platforms. Those other platforms aren't as big as YouTube because people don't use them.