Hacker News Reader

Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

What if YouTube just said no? Like, remove YouTube from Canada. Then have Canadian citizens complain to their government and cause an uproar. This is such a sneaky thing the government is doing that most people won't care. But pull YouTube completely out of Canada and people will start to pay attention.

View on HN

It's only sneaky if you're completely unaware of Canadian laws. Radio and TV stations have abided by domestic quota rules for a very long time. Online video was obviously going to come under that umbrella at some point.

The difference is that radio and TV stations only play one thing at a time. Mandating a domestic quota mandates that those content get airtime.

There is no such guaranteed for Youtube and the like.

How is that solved online? You can show you X% of domestic content, but if people don't play it will the legislation go further to mandate a certain % played/viewed?

Are there any precedents of large companies doing that (successfully)?

YouTube particularly can't afford to play games like this because TikTok has no problem following the rules and taking YouTube’s viewers like it's been doing.

Maybe I'm just not in the demographic to know that tictoc WOULD take over the space.

We've seen some small scale attempts at this with Google News, but I eagerly await the day someone tries it for real. Imagine Whatsapp backing out of India to strongarm the government. It'll be awful for everyone involved in the long run, but the journey there will be interesting.

or google maps - India really needs a good domestic alternative!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com