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The difference is that people upload 500 hours of video[1] to Youtube every minute. I honestly can't even fathom how much data that is.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-up...

Ok, and why should I as a user care about this? No one asked youtube to become a monopoly and I don't exactly have much compassion for the engineering woes that come with this.

I'd be perfectly fine with an upload cap if that reduces the hosting cost in any way. But of course that would be against the "groth at any cost" mantra.

You don't have to "care", but I think this is a huge reason (in addition to the network effect) that people continue to use Youtube. Where else can you store an unlimited amount of video for free, for approximately forever?

Content rights are a big part of the cost, and criminal enterprises won't attract too many original content creators I'd wager.

Are those pirate video sites P2P? Or how do they work?