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Re:YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators by TheOtherHobbes on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @08:43AM (#18282848)
Defintermediate all the things, so someone else can reintermediate them.

The Internet has been handed over to de facto monopolies operating under a thin pretext of competitive legitimacy.

We'll probably see antitrust action to split them up in twenty years or so, by which time it will be too late to make a difference.

The only thing that can change this is physical server decentralisation, which is going to rely on massive bandwidth improvements and nation-state grade security protocols.

When I can run a personal server on a personal device and serve content to thousands - some of whom may want to peer it, if it's interesting enough - then we may see a genuinely free Internet.

As it is, instead of "seeing censorship as damage and routing around it", the Internet has been seen as political damage itself, and the political system has effectively neutered it by reducing it to yet another financialised cultural channel.

Re:YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators by SpelingBeeChamp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @10:11AM (#18283502)
> When I can run a personal server on a personal device and serve content to thousands - some of whom may want to peer it, if it's interesting enough - then we may see a genuinely free Internet.

Uhh... you can do this right now.

Like most people you may not have the skills or equipment necessary to do so, but 100% anyone can do this today, down to hosting their own DNS server. (And then they can discover that it is much cheaper to pay someone else to do it for them.)

Re:YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators by anoncake on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @10:25AM (#18283604)
If you don't have the skills or equipment to do something, you literally cannot do it.
Re:YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators by samontar on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @10:44AM (#18283779)
The skill barrier is low. It’s all turnkey now with cloud platforms. Literally just a web tutorial away. The hard part is the audience and the fact that video hosting is expensive for individuals.
Re:YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators by Silhouette on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:08PM (#18284611)
But depending on which "cloud platform" you're using, you're drifting back towards centralisation again.

Possibly the most important change that my previous post alluded to was that everyone's ISP used to bundle some basic web space in the same way that they bundled a basic email account and ran their own Usenet server. You automatically had a web site if you just ticked the "on" box, and you could upload your content with a simple FTP transfer. Many ISPs provided some "my first web site" level instructions to get you started on building things yourself, even with the inevitable "under construction" graphic.

Sadly, those days are mostly gone. With the rise of centralised hosting (sorry, "cloud") services, ISPs seem to have backed away from including those kinds of secondary facilities in their typical plans, except for maybe email addresses. And so now, it is mostly only larger organisations and the geeks and enthusiasts who self-host in any meaningful sense, and everyone else is hosting their basic business site on Facebook, their blog on Medium or WP, their geek-friendly site on GitHub, their vlog on YouTube, etc.