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A comment on YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views. Parent comment

Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by falcolas on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:21PM (#20106775)
If a private developer were to take over most residential areas in a section of town, they would be responsible for providing public access, affordable housing, and other responsibilities normally associated with the government. This is enshrined in law - a private company that is the de-facto entity for a particular function gains the responsibilities of acting as a government entity.

Since YouTube has a monopoly on video content on the internet, it may be reasonable to require YouTube to take on responsibilities normally handled by the government, such as ensuring the freedom of speech on their platform.

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Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by nathan_long on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:56PM (#20107231)
> If a private developer were to take over most residential areas in a section of town

There is a finite amount of land in a town, so a monopoly can exclude people. This is not true of video hosting - there can be as many video hosts as people care to build, and they are all equally usable from anywhere on the internet.

> Since YouTube has a monopoly on video content on the internet

They don't.

Now, if ISPs started censoring particular political viewpoints, that would be different IMO. It's much harder to get a different ISP (at least where I live) than it is to browse to a different web site.

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Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by falcolas on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @04:31PM (#20108814)
> This is not true of video hosting - there can be as many video hosts as people care to build, and they are all equally usable from anywhere on the internet.

There is a limited number of viewers, and content creators. YouTube has the monopoly on those two limited resources.

I'd also contend that "equally usable" is also not true, especially with HD videos. Most of the world can't stream 4k videos across a L3 provider (which YouTube does not have do).

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