Google's entire business model seems to be to operate everything as a loss-leader for AdSense. It turns out that that's extremely anti-competitive and I'm growing to think that it probably should be illegal.
The only way that anyone can compete with the free services that Google provides is to run it off the profits from a massive cash cow like AdSense. Until somebody finds some service/revenue model that provides that, it's just not going to happen.
The only way that anyone can compete with AdSense is to own users interactions with the browser like Google's free services do. Until somebody owns that much of your traffic, no-one will compete with AdSense.
I'm far from confident that nationalization is the answer, but I don't know what is. I think we're perhaps dealing with a new sort of problem that requires a new sort of solution, that has yet to be devised.
Given the little I know about Facebook's server infrastructure, they don't really have the capability to deliver a "Baby Youtube" anytime soon. They don't have the physical space available for the hardware they'd need and if they did it would rapidly be absorbed by their larger teams who need it already. Plus they just don't do high quality video well. That combined with the visibility limitations of the feed don't really make it a great platform for self-branding, unless you're willing to shell out major cash for promotion.
Amazon makes more sense as Twitch is already a good analogue for Youtube. It also pairs well with their budding media empire. That said, Twitch actually brings in money -- it doesn't depend entirely on subsidy to function.
I think what I'm getting at, ultimately, is that hosting your own video content probably shouldn't be free. I'm sort of tonedeaf to complaints over the streaming Adpocalypse because these streamers/person-brands exist purely through advertising subsidy in the first place. If the quality of your content is good, it's worth paying for distribution (and/or self-hosting) because you will see a return.
So it turns out that Vimeo is probably the right choice. Reviewing their content guidelines, it seems as though most of the commercial content that has been kicked off other platforms fine as long as it isn't spammy or sexually explicit.
I'm just spitballing here, but if Youtube were handed over to the United States Postal Service (which has a reasonable but far from untarnished reputation for being content neutral. probably a better recent track record than google's), maybe that would be an improvement. Using tax dollars to subsidize a content neutral video platform would raise a lot of questions though, no least of which being how to handle monetization so that content producers get paid for what they upload. If the replacement platform can't compensate content producers, I don't think it will succeed. And of course it would also open the platform up to government directed censorship which can have more serious consequences than corporate directed censorship, but on the other hand gives the censored an arguably better chance of rectifying the situation through the courts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_censorship#Countries_kn...)