"The wasters of bandwidth will win..."

Ah, good old Gilder. From prophet to almost forgotten. I remember reading some articles about him in some old web magazine.

High tech used to be more exciting when it barely worked.

Gilder was also connected to Milken, the king of junk bonds.

[additional] What Gilder was talking about wasn't YouTube. He was talking about Milken financing MCI to billions, to lay down fibre. Fundamentally connecting people to the Internet. YouTube assumes MCI existed and was well funded.

This is almost certainly true, but the transformation is going to take more than a few years. It's probably not a great idea to start a company today that burns money with current bandwidth costs, but would hypothetically thrive in a world of dirt-cheap bandwidth. It could certainly pan out for you, but a lot can go wrong between now and some unknown point in the future.