That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.
Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
Which do you think has more value to me? (a) I save some money by exploiting the storage loophole (b) The existence of a cultural repository of cat videos, animated mathematics explainers, long video essays continue to be available to (some parts of) humanity (for the near future).
Anyway in this situation it's less that YouTube is providing us a service and more, it's captured a treasure trove of our cultural output and sold it back to us. Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical. If YouTube goes away, we'll replace it - PeerTube or other federated options are viable. The loss of the corpus of videos would be sad but not catastrophic - some of it is backed up. I have ~5Tb of YouTube backed up, most of it smaller channels.
I agree generally with you that the word "value" is overencompassing to the point of absurdity though. Instrumental value is equated with moral worth, personal attachment, and distribution of scarcity. Too many concepts for one word.
I feel the same way. (Although, I am less sure of it.) However, I think backing up important parts of YouTube, as you have done, is a much better approach towards doing this.
OTOH I'm 100.0% sure that google has a plan, been expecting this for years and in particular, has prior experience from free Gmail accounts being used for storage.
Hmmm, isn't the "free-ness" of YouTube because there were determined to outspend and outlast any potential competitors (ie supported by the Search business), in order to create a monopoly for then extracting $$$ from?
I'm kind of expecting the extracting part is only getting started. :(
Looking at the Wikipedia page for "Commons" [0] the first meaning of commons "accessible to all members of a society" is not really true, unless "on the whim of the YT platform". The second meaning of "natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit" is also not really true. There is no understanding that google will take any other than their own benefit into account. The third meaning of commons on that page is closest I guess to what is needed:
> Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
And that is certainly not what Youtube can be considered to be. Youtube videos are not in the commons, but kept on a proprietary platform where the proprietor is the sole decider what happens to its availability there.
Exactly which countries could they buy?
Let me guess: you haven’t actually asked gemini