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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

The world's topmost universities (e.g. Yale, MIT) publish those same lectures on their own websites along with other course materials. We could demand public universities do the same for all courses. If they weren't part of monopolized platforms already, by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat (we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area), and it'd be unmetered just like phone calls. Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period, making everything up to 1998 available, or we could even shorten it to 10-15 years.

The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.

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> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat

we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.

> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area

Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.

> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period

And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.

> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology

Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).

> Ads enable market capture

Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.

My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 100M-1B MAU charging $1/year on hardware from a decade ago? The actual cost of these things is trivial.

Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.

Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.

People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.

> because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap

underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.

> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful

Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.

> c.f. bittorrent

That is plain old theft.

> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.

Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.

> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service

That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.

The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc. They're the reason why computers are over 10x faster than they were 10-15 years ago, storage is 1000x faster, networks are 100x faster, etc. The technology is cheap because of actual technology companies. You don't need a centralized service for video calls. You need lots of bandwidth between endpoints and some relatively modest signaling servers (similar to voice calling, which already existed).

Bittorrent does not equate to theft, and the point is it demonstrates that actually distribution costs nothing. The production of most media was paid for generations ago. It can be free or extremely cheap because it's literally free on the provider side. The thing that costs money is monetization.

The fact that self-publishers are at the mercy of ad companies is the point. The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.

> The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc

And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.

> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.

Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.

> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.

I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.

Those companies have been developing hardware with exponential improvements for generations now. They wouldn't have stopped if not for youtube. Youtube and Whatsapp became possible because of them, not the other way around.

Phone companies are literally a concrete, non-theoretical demonstration that call signaling doesn't need to be centralized for a good experience. There's also already XMPP which works like email: you can add your contacts and just start video calls over it just like you can just send emails. It works today. It scales today. You can use it right now, but the monopolists lock everyone into their networks.

Your "counter-example" proves my point: giving youtube away for free canabalizes youtube premium.

Video isn't free to host, not at scale. Look at how much providers charge for "video on your own site" services. Sure, you can bypass these providers and implement everything yourself, but that isn't going to be much cheaper. Storage, transcoding and egress just cost what they cost.

Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.

P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.

"Not at scale" is kind of the point; there's no need for one company to host everything. If I were so inclined I could host Netflix quality streaming off my home Internet connection to my entire neighborhood with a selection of thousands of movies for about the capital cost of a new iphone.

Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.

I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.

The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.

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