Let's say your video has some modicum of success on no-name-host.com. Suddenly facebook, youtube, reddit, discord all ban links to that host to reduce spread. They do this intentionally. They brag about it to politicians. They get rewarded for acting as a block... by the state.
It's a nice little proxy arrangement.
If most of the world's population was on one continent-sized piece of private property, and because it was private property the owners were allowed to censor whoever they wanted, "you can go talk freely on the almost empty island over there, maybe someone from the continent will come listen!" doesn't sound like free speech to me.
I agree that getting rid of algorithmic search/recommendation/promotion would be a big step forward, but platforms for speech of a certain massive size like Youtube/twitter/facebook/etc should also be heavily regulated and their ability to censor limited. They are, due to their overwhelming size, de-facto custodians of speech.
Vimeo
Name the next five that are discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day.
No one has an inalienable right to any of these features, let alone to all of them in a neat package. The organizations that invest ingenuity, capital and labor to create platforms with those features do have a right to set terms on how their platforms is used.
I don't get how the solution to what is seen as corporate authoritarianism (on private property) is asking for more authoritarianism (by the government) to force persons to host content they'd rather not.
As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free, why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.
- It's not cheap - It's not easy
However, it's a platform of speech that is available to everyone, and if you want to scale to millions, one can add the same caching layers etc that FAANG can. We've seen this kind of thing when people were banned from twitter or whatever, and ended up migrating to other twitter-competitors. Newspapers are not required to post our opinions, and I don't think youtube is either.
Have fun with that egress bill when your video goes viral.
You are performing some sleight of hand here - claiming they are the only way to share your view - when what you are really referring to is that they have the most viewers, and that they have tools for promoting content in front of that audience.
"I deserve access to an audience on their system" is a very weak claim compared to the (untrue) "they are the only place I can share my views."
Personally, I say kill the era of algorithmic search and recommendation. Then you'd have to convince people with compelling content to link out to you, not just be clickbait that plays well in the naive algorithmic feedback loops. Good luck!