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Re:Break Up Google by supermatt on Monday June 29, 2020 @03:06AM (#23675139)
I agree - There is no way that Youtube could compete without access to google resources. If they had to pay for their own bandwidth, hosting, transcoding, etc while surviving off adsense revenue (paying same google "commission" as everyone else), they would quickly drive themselves into bancruptcy simply due to their popularity!

They are stifling competition because they have unlimited funds to throw at anything they want. They should definitely be split up.

Re:Break Up Google by silasdavis on Monday June 29, 2020 @03:31AM (#23675326)
Would users get a better service from the successors of YouTube? Would we have to watch more ads?
Re:Break Up Google by SenHeng on Monday June 29, 2020 @04:37AM (#23675631)
There's a freemium video service in japan called Nico Video [0] that has been around for about the same length of time as Youtube. On the free tier, you're essentially limited to a really shitty video quality, somewhere around 480p. It also has ads and some kind of rate limiting. Besides subscriptions, they also do tie-ups and other PR related stuff. Video quality has never really been that good even on the premium tier. Their whole selling point seems to be community interaction, where by viewers can post comments directly into the video stream [1]. As far as I can tell, they've been bleeding money for the last decade though they seemed to have turned a profit this year.

My conclusion is that no, users would not get a better service.

[0]: https://www.nicovideo.jp

[1]: http://blog.nicovideo.jp/en_info/2013/01/post-037484.html

[2]: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ニコニコ動画#ビジネス

Re:Break Up Google by kevingadd on Monday June 29, 2020 @03:34AM (#23675347)
Impossible to know for sure, since any better service is going to get suffocated by Google's market power unless it's backed by another huge player like Amazon.
Re:Break Up Google by t_sawyer on Monday June 29, 2020 @05:14PM (#23683152)
YouTube existed without Google. Google bought them.
Re:Break Up Google by supermatt on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @03:26AM (#23698760)
And it wasn't profitable then, either.