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> but we need to go to the dumb wire days of the telephone companies who couldn't control what people say on the phone and if their services were used to do bad things it was the law enforcements job to deal with it.

That is today. You do not get to control Google’s computers.

Buy your own server(s), buy your own bandwidth, and do what you please.

Lobby your representatives to make symmetric fiber internet a utility to each home, and implement ipv6 so you can serve content from your house and not have to depend on bigger companies to get around CGNAT.

> You do not get to control Google’s computers.

Then why does Google control my phone? Can't have it both ways

That is an unrelated topic.

> why does Google control my phone

Because you chose to buy that phone. Plenty of phones without their software.

Yes I can instead choose to buy an Apple.... much worse

The internet is no longer decentralized and interoperable. It's all walled gardens. Want to send an email? Better be on a major email platform or none of your messages will arrive.

Guaranteeing internet access as a utility is a great idea but by itself it's only an illusion of freedom. Access to things like Google accounts / AWS / cloudflare and of course the banking system and payment processor duopoly also need to be guaranteed to some degree all law abiding citizens.

Edit: I don't think this applies in the case here with Russell Brand and demonitization. There should obviously not be any right to be paid by advertisers.

Government should offer email (and identity verification) as a utility. And if the populace wants video streaming as a utility, then that too, although I would rather the government simply provide high quality fiber internet connections as a utility since that is limiting factor in hosting your videos.

That further centralizes, makes matter worse.

Government is also extremely inefficient. To build the service it'll cost them 10x more than private companies doing it. How much do you want to pay in taxes? There will come a point that even if the government actually is trying, that even if the entire GDP is converted the taxes that it'll still end up with a worse quality of life for the rest of us. Governments is easily corrupt and extremely inefficient. Its almost never the answer.

I don’t think so. Email is low barrier to entry, and a constitutionally protected email account would protect people’s ability to communicate electronically, especially if the government is going to communicate via email with you.

USPS can handle it all. SMS 2FA should also be replaced with something that is legally protected no matter what, so it doesn’t matter if you get blocked by Google/Apple/ATT/Verizon/etc, you can still live your life.

Same for an electronic money account.

absolutely, how do i support this

Then why were you crying the other day that the US needs to nationalize SpaceX to help Ukraine? Can’t they just built their own space based internet network?

I do not recall commenting on that topic at all.

This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.

Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand. Ownership, money, property etc. are all constructs based on a social contract, Sundar Pichai by himself can't have control on more than a suitcase and a vehicle maybe - he can control Alphabet only because as a society we decided to operate in a certain way and sounds he makes and finger movements he does end up steering giant network of people who interact with other networks of people who happen to have control over some machinery. This means, if the social contract isn't working out we can change that social contract to suits our needs better. One change can be about how computers that transmit videos over TCP/IP should operate.

Symmetric fibre internet exists in many European countries, and is readily available to a large bulk of citizens in those countries already. I pay $25pm for 500Mbps symmetric today.

I can’t fly to another planet and terraform it. I can (and do) host my own video streams however.

It's not about the tech. Plenty of people could have built Twitter from scratch, but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.

>but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.

As far as I understand, musk offered $40B for Twitter, unprompted. Is there any evidence that he put out offers to build an alternative for $39B? Because I feel like it would have been taken up given the widespread belief that he was overpaying, and even Musk believed that since he tried to back out.

> This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.

Not at all like that because building a video hosting service is a relatively trivial task, with the only limitation being money. Which the US government has more of than Google.

> Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand.

I would rather the government provide the video hosting as a utility rather than commandeer Google’s computers.

There’s a bit more to it than this. If you run afoul of the big payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, you may find it difficult to even pay for the stuff you mentioned (or get paid).

The ideal of companies being able to refuse service makes sense from a freedom perspective but in reality we have a handful of very skewed markets, and there is often no “municipal alternative” to support those who have been blacklisted.

So the solution is to create those “municipal alternatives”. Constitutionally guaranteed electronic money account and ability to receive and send money, constitutionally guaranteed access to internet, email, and identity verification services, provided by the government.

And any abuse should be prosecuted by the government.

Zayo, HE and Kiwifarms

And if you don’t moderate at all you get deluged under piles of crap, hate speech, spam, and bot-created garbage. Might as well not even try. In any sort of forum context, zero moderation makes it useless at least for most.

Moderation against abuse of your own system is fine, that's given. Even electricity companies will go after you if you abuse their grid but they won't care what kind of videos you film using their electricity.

However I don't think that YouTube should decide what's hate speech and ban it. If that speech is illegal, the law enforcement should find the person. Maybe it can be acceptable to let the law enforcement delete videos but that's also risky because that's how you can get speech suppression when the government isn't very good.

Hate speech is not illegal in the US. Youtube is not judging what speech is legal or not, they're just making a decision about which types of content they want to distribute.

Then that speech should remain on YouTube and those concern by the content of the speech should simply produce counterarguments and discredit that speech.

You realize the idea that YouTube videos of the sort being discussed here will result in thoughtful counter arguments is a completely naive notion?

Twitter's community notes works quite well. I don't think that people are incapable of discussion.

IMHO the problem is anonymity combined with some harmful dopamine loop, making people act horribly. Maybe even putting the age of the poster next to the nickname will reduce the heat of the discussion quite a bit.

Have you ever seen the kind of stuff people post on Facebook or on local news sites under their own name, next to their own photographs? These theories about internet civility have been disproven repeatedly over the past decade plus.

Yep. Who was hurt by all that? The problems arise when bunch of incels congregate on some anonymous imageboards or forums.

People saying dumbs stuff with no follow up is never a problem. If anything, they are quite interesting because you can look at those and see what kind of stuff they believe and talk about IRL. There are people analysing those to tackle actual issues because banning it online doesn't stop it from beings discussed in private or small groups.

> Yep. Who was hurt by all that?

The Rohingya for one

They were hurt but I’m not convinced that it was due to online posting. IMHO, Facebook was a reflection of what’s happening in real life. FB banning it would not do a thing, maybe change the timing due to the butterfly effect. What they(those who care about Rohingya people) should have done was to use these posts as intelligence about what’s about to happen and take precautions.

What is the counter argument to speech that calls a particular group of people "sub-human, and a stain on our planet"? What's to debate?

Lets be clear here - we're not talking about difference in opinion of fiscal policy that we can debate the pros and cons of.

I don't know, what about teaching the kids the history of hate they can recognise BS and just don't pay attention to it?

You can't delegate raising your kids to YouTube, right? What about the grown ups you say, well words are not spells - just because someone said that some group of people are sub-human doesn't make others believe that. We are not photocopiers, we are humans.

That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned.

> That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned.

Wait, so youtube shouldn't go after hate speech, because that's legal in the US, but should go after conspiracies and alternative history, despite those also being legal in the US? This doesn't make sense.

Nope, that’s not what I said.

I don't understand then, can you explain where I got it wrong?

madeofpalk said "Hate speech is not illegal in the US. [...]"

to which you responded "Then that speech should remain on YouTube and those concern by the content of the speech should simply produce counterarguments and discredit that speech."

I take this to mean that you think hate speech shouldn't be removed from youtube because it isn't illegal in the US.

Then you said "That hate speech claiming that some group of people are "stain on our planet" will probably claim other stuff like conspiracies and alternative history. Go after those if you are concerned."

I take this to mean that you think people who claim stuff like conspiracies and alternative history are fair game for youtube to "go after". But those things are just as legal as hate speech in America.

Where is my error in understanding?

Or maybe they were saying, “Don’t argue with an Idiot”. Or were referencing the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

If you do want to argue, and correct the grave injustice of someone being wrong on the internet, something like history might be a better topic as you will have more of a basis for argument - although in my experience people can find a way to be obtuse and redirect discussions about anything…sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

It’s not YouTube that’s supposed to go after those, it’s those who have concerns that should go after those who concern them with their speech. That’s the main point of my whole argument.

Anyway, I really don’t enjoy arguing over semantic. If I say I don’t mean that, it means I don’t mean that but it’s possible that I wasn’t articulate enough.

That's a great policy idea! You should create a competitor to YouTube so that you can enforce it. Nobody's stopping you.

They haven't stopped _distributing_ Brand's videos. They just have stopped paying him money from the ads.

You’re just passing the problem off to someone else who won’t do anything about it. Unmoderated sites are cesspools in general. But I guess they’re at least unfiltered cesspools.

> then it's likely that YouTube is pushing cultures to align with SV or some managers in Google.

This is as sure as that the sun will rise tomorrow. I have absolutely no doubt that the rest of the world is culturally influenced by the larger SV companies.

> we need to move to a model where if you can moderate content you are liable for the content.

Agree completely.

Hasn't pushing cultural norms on others always been the case with American-centric media? Before silicon valley it was Hollywood. They've got all the big budgets to produce hyperviolent movies but lord help you, if there's an uncovered boob, then it's an R rating and a much tougher pitch to studios.

YouTube had to appease its advertisers to make money. I can’t think of a utility that has this revenue model.

If that revenue model doesn't work YT should find a new one or seize to exists.

It's not god's given right to run a profitable business, businesses who harm the society and can't find ways to operate at profit without harming the society go out of business all the time.

Modern auction based ad platforms are much less economically sensitive to the pressure of advertiser ethics than traditional ad platforms like cable TV.

If one advertiser pulls out for ethical reasons their placement goes to the next bidder at an infinitesimally smaller price. And at the back of the line there’s always a game developer willing to pay a couple of dollars per install.

This is why the Facebook ad boycotts were so ineffective. Especially compared to the impact of the Twitter ad boycott - with Twitter having never developed a modern auction based platform.

The YouTube “adpocalypse” suggests that YouTube is sensitive to it in a way that google and Facebook aren’t. I don’t know how their ad purchasing system works though.

Youtube is not a utility.

The answer to that is yes, kind of. Google only really cares what people say in English and perhaps some other major languages. Speech in less common languages is less moderated in general across the internet.