So hosting services deserve safe harbor protections, but hosting services that provide a nice front-end to your data (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, etc.) don't.
This is wrong. I think the internet would be a better place if it were easier for people to run their own servers, but that doesn't mean we should make it more difficult for hosted services to operate.
I don't think that I advocated what the author is necessarily. I feel that people should be working towards a more decentralized web, but removing safe-harbor protections from large sites just because they provide an obstacle to a more decentralized web is not really the correct stance to take.
Take Facebook for example, why couldn't we just have a number of providers of social networking services with an agreed-upon protocol to communication/authentication between them? Then I could run my own server for my profile/albums/etc while someone less tech-savvy could sign up with a ready-to-go service that pays for itself with ads.
The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions.
> There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.
But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.