However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status, I hope they are litigated against successfully.
This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice. See "advertiser friendly content"[1] and Adpocalypse[2][3].
Land line phones and cell phones are funded by subscriptions and they are also point-to-point communication between 2 private individuals. Phones (barring small-scale exceptions such as conference calls) are not a "broadcasting" medium.
There is no broadcasting medium in the world that acts as a neutral carrier. Not newspapers. And not tv like NBC/CBS/ABC. Even the government funded broadcasters like American PBS or UK BBC are not neutral carriers.
Ok, let's say you this ambitious idealism to create a new broadcasting website that allows anything except for child pornography. How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma. Subscriptions? Most people don't want to pay a subscription fee for user-generated-content. Yes some die-hard web surfers pay for Youtube Red/Premium to avoid ads but they are a small minority that's not enough to pay for the entire Youtube infrastructure. So far, only funding based on advertising seems to be viable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+advertisers+abandon+...
[3] https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/04/20/pg-resumes-youtube-spe...
It should be as well.
Disallow advertising companies from paying for ads on specific content only.
They should have a blanket agreement to show N ads, to user demographics, interests, etc. But not the ability to not have their ads shown on particular channels/videos. That just gives the ad companies censorship power.
>How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma
Ban by law "a la cart content/ad choice" across all platforms. Customers/Ad companies either sign to show their ads the platform or they don't. No selection of channels/videos they'll be shown on (except if they have a deal with a specific channel as sponsors). If that's the case for all platforms by law, they can't go to another platform to have it cater to their demands...
That way a platform doesn't have to cater for specific "ad friendly" content. Just to have popular content, that draws ads in general.
That's easy, because the law I propose will decree so.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
>It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
If anything, my problem with government is that enough of it is dictated by those same interests (lobbys, private interests, advertisers, etc) as opposed by the voters directly. But that's another thing to solve, and giving more power to those interests is the opposite of the solution.
Honestly I think politicians are bigger scum and they have the power of the state to impose their will. Do you really think if you gave the state power they would use it fairly?
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
Elected officials don’t get into the minutiae of enforcing those types of laws. Unelected committees like the FTC do and most of your recourse if you don’t like it is to file lawsuits that are decided by unelected judges that have lifetime appointments.
Not to mention that even those appointments are made by the Senate where the flyover states in “Middle America” and the “Bible Belt” have power far more than their populations would call for thanks to them having two seats in the Senate just like the more populous states. Those are both the last people I want to give more power to.
Yes I’m well aware that the other side is just as bad.
If someone wants to spread bullshit and hate, let them do it on their own dime, or find someone wanting to do spread it.
They are not forced to do anything. They can always NOT advertise.
What I propose is not forcing them to subsidise anything, it is about taking away from them the power to dictate terms to platforms.
Moreover, the "bullshit and hate" is your strawman.
Traditionally, and I'm not some Gen Z to not remember this, it has been the right that was pushing advertisers and platforms to assist in censoring tv shows, music videos, records, etc with non-approved messages (pro-gay, anti-religion, pro-choice, etc).
That the tables have turned for a while doesn't mean the tables will always be this way (we're already 4 years into Trump for one), and I don't even believe the tables have turned as in "it's just bullshit and hateful stuff that's demonetized". I think that all kinds of good content is demonetized all the time, both left and right wing.
Any cause you personally might like can easily be labeled "bullshit" and or "hateful".
I think if you want to separate YouTube into separate stacks (eg fundamental infrastructure for hosting videos & a publisher / curator of those videos) you could imagine the infra part not being picky about what is uploaded (as long as it is legal) but the publisher part de listing videos except to be shared by link
Do you take issue with that?
They only pull ads because they can. If all platforms are banned from allowing removal of ads on specific videos, then those advertisers will have the option to (a) advertise, or (b) not advertise.
Will the opt-out of YouTube (and every major platform) altogether?
In fact, the public will also understand it's not up to the advertisers and the story will end there. The people can then try to boycot YouTube itself for having a specific video, but that wont go very far either, especially if it doesn't touch the advertising money.
It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
For one, I don't want anybody "making censorship decisions". We're not that far from the time the majority would like pro-integration/black, gay friendly, or atheist e.g content censored.
Second, they don't vote with their wallet on the actual content. They could always vote by not watching the video they don't like, and if enough people did that, the video would naturally not have advertising revenue.
But no, while they hate on the video, they don't target it, but target the company making some totally irrelevant to it advertised product, using their complain to negatively affect the video creators.
Third, and more important, this is not actual voting, nobody counts and there are no official rules and limits. A 20% or even 10% of customers can make the companys, and throu that, the content creators' life miserable (cut ad revenue, deplatform, censor, lose display space, etc), even if a bigger majority has no problem or even likes it. In fact, you don't even need that (10-20%), just enough determined hardcore complainers creating a fuzz, even if they're like 1% of customers, many companies just don't care to suffer them, and cave in.
Fourth, advertising companies also take pressure from their customers, the advertised companies, not just the public. Even more pressure there. So companies can also have leverage to stop them giving ads to content they don't like (whistleblowers, critical videos, etc).
>This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
Since the problem is advertisers having too much power by being able to choose the videos they advertise in, of course more regulation disallowing that will fix it!
If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube
I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Now advertisers are effectively still making the same decisions that they were, YouTube is still the preferred advertising backend, and nothing changed except that you made it harder for smaller sites like Vimeo to attract advertisers
Your regulation idea is reckless because you haven't thought it through
Not if laws lessen it. Which is my whole point.
>If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube. I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
It's only obvious within a certain puritan culture. In Europe nobody would bat an eye if an advertiser for a, say, fast food store, advertised in pornhub. People wouldn't want to take them down.
>One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Adults are not kids - they don't need or should require special segmentation from different content (aside from their chosing what they like to view/read).
So we'd just needs a kids and an adults YouTube.
Plus making advertising on the adults YouTube wholesale: you buy impressions/views/clicks/etc - and that's it. You don't get a say which video they appear on.
In fact, the "break up big tech" groups might laud such a thing
There is no way of framing your regulation so that it does something useful. Instead it will only ever be a burden on smaller distributers and hurt their chances of advertising (because in order to find advertisers, those advertisers will either have to not care about the content or be convinced that the content is pg -- an incredibly onerous technical burden)
This idea that the regulation wouldn't have consequences you don't like because you don't like them is a fantasy
None of your ideas make any sense here
Actually it can. That's the whole point, legislation can do anything, In the US case it can even change the constitution with a new amendment...
YouTube does not have a monopoly on video streaming. There is nothing stopping anyone from paying for the bandwidth and streaming anything they want by renting computer hardware and bandwidth from a colo.
Heck, I can set up a bandwidth adaptive video stream and put it behind a CDN.
I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.
And no, it's not germane that these websites are operated by private corporations. If anything, the fact that hugely important forums where modern speach takes place are censored by parties without any form of democratic accountability adds weight to the argument against censorship in these spaces.
If we had a vibrant tech economy with new platforms arising and competing amongst eachother, it would be a different story, but when we have a stale internet landscape dominated by sprawling behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook, what happens on their platforms are issues of national importance and cannot be left to undemocratic governance and censorship.
We can decide that it's too dangerous to encourage people to commit violence, for example
We can still change laws (and have recently!) about what types of posts are acceptable. I want a world where we democratically decide that revenge porn is illegal.
But it doesn't even seem like you read my post, much less the link.
Freedom of speech means that anyone can write letters or start their own newspaper/platform, not that all other newspapers/platforms have to give part of their audience to everyone.
The opportunity to be a neutral carrier is sacrificed by any platform that deploys a recommendation engine. Recommending content is a form of curation, which makes them a publisher, conceptually. It does not matter if the content curation is done by hand or by an algorithm that was built by hand.
They're already that. Youtwitgrambook's front-page and suggestion algorithms are forms of curation, specifically designed to maximize some form of engagement metric.
Their respective content policies are really just an attempt to correct the failings of algorithmic curation.
The current situation is because governments passed laws to regulate the type of content they are allowed to show.
The "phone company" is not the right analogy. They are more like mass media (TV, news papers, etc), which is the rational for censoring them
> The current situation is because governments passed laws to regulate the type of content they are allowed to show.
> The "phone company" is not the right analogy. They are more like mass media (TV, news papers, etc), which is the rational for censoring them
This assumes they don't have the legal resources to fend off such a case.
For example: They could easily - but actively choose not to - host pornography.
They do not want to host everything that is legal.