This all happened after the big Viacom lawsuit against Google: Google set themselves up as private arbitration and gave the big media companies a massive gift of control of the platform, pretty much because they didn't want to deal with continued suits directed at them. Even though the Safe Harbor provisions basically absolved them of any responsibility, they'd still have to fight in court every time some litigious parasites sued them.

That's when ContentID and the non-DMCA takedowns started happening.

And this is exactly what will happen to any competing service that grows big enough to be relevant.

> The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content ...

You hit on this in your first sentence. And this whole arrangement with Google is specifically to side-step those penalties. Your 'easiest solution' is for Google to return to DMCA takedown requests. I agree. I want that. I think most consumers and content creators would.

But Big Media doesn't.

Maybe they do, but not in the obvious way. DMCA is the sledge hammer they use to force sites into these more terrible arrangements.

I mean, how fast would Google move if a non-responsive take down resulted in the youtube.com domain being seized?

I think Google could have moved plenty fast enough to ever prevent a domain seizure. I think if Google had ever had creators in mind, they'd have put some money into their legal responses to takedown requests, and they'd have also forced Big Media to play by the rules. The way I see it, it came down to Google being threatened with becoming a defendant to the infringement suits brought against uploaders. Clearly, the DMCA protects web sites as long as the process is followed, which Google could have afforded to do for awhile.

Instead, Google would rather have made their own job easier by standardizing 'requests.' There's nothing in the DMCA specifying that some standard, machine-readable format be used. To get the media companies on board with keeping the takedown request process as automated as possible, they compromised.