As a consumer I don’t necessarily want competition in say video. I want to be able to go to one place to find a user created video, search once and find all the videos on that topic. I want to learn one UI for that and I want to know that the vast majority of video content will be there. YouTube’s scale grants me, as a consumer, huge advantages. The same goes for content creators.

That doesn’t mean I dont want oversight. I think there may be a role for regulation in the public interest, but blindly chopping YouTube up into a hundred geographically separated chunks would be unbelievably dumb. Is ‘competition’ really going to compensate for the loss of convenience? There have always been competing video upload sites, but people go where the scale is because they like the scale. They want the scale. It has value to them.

The same goes for the App Store. I’m a happy Apple customer. I like the App Store and I think it works well, but I’m not entirely against government scrutiny of how it operates, in principle. Yes I’m concerned Apple could abuse its power, but killing the App Store or mandating by law that Apple has to implement policies that will tear the App Store into bits benefits me how? Will it make it easier for me to find and install Apps? Will it improve their quality? Will fragmented app stores make it easier for developers to connect with customers and earn revenue? I’m not convinced.

> You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

The problem was never the scale of the company. If YouTube was instead 100 different companies, there would still be a total of 49 years worth of video being uploaded every day which nobody would have the resources to review. Each company would have 1% of the video but also 1% of the revenue and the cost would be just as insurmountable.

I'm not sure why you brought up reviewing the videos. I couldn't find it as I glanced through this thread. If YT was 100 different companies competing against each other, then there would be positive effects as each on tried to out-innovate each other. They wouldn't just be 100 static mini YT's..and if some of them did that they wouldn't make it.

The scale of the company prevents meaningful competition, that's the issue, not necessarily that they can't affordably review the 49 years worth of video.

This whole debate originated in some people noticing that there was a lot of wrongthink on the internet and then starting to yell at tech companies for not fixing it. But it turns out that problem is legitimately hard and the tech companies don't have a magic wand, so all their attempts have been ham-fisted disasters that trample all over everything like a frightened elephant.

That problem in particular isn't really one that competition would solve, because it's fundamentally a demand for censorship, and more competition would make censorship harder. Which is maybe a good thing anyway.

And creators would either upload their videos to 100 different services, or users would only be able to find 1% as much content.

That one is the easiest to solve -- separate discovery from hosting. You want to find a video, you go to a search engine. Any search engine you like. They all index all the videos everywhere. Some may even be dedicated to video or make recommendations etc.

The biggest problem there is that all the hosts want you to use their search and do what they can to get in the way of any third party turning them into a dumb pipe. But this is where some kind of P2P service could really have an advantage, because it doesn't have to care about that -- let it be a dumb pipe on purpose and it wins, because there are a thousand companies who would love to be in the video search/discovery business and not have to pay the cost of hosting the videos or worry about a centralized third party host locking them out next week.

So now when I want to find videos on a topic, for many of the videos I’ll get a hundred hits for the same video uploaded to each service. But if the one I want was only uploaded to one device, it’ll be buried in a sea of hundreds of duplicates.

If using a search engine is the ordinary method of discovery then there would be no need to upload the same video to multiple services. Meanwhile if people did that anyway, the search engine would want to figure out how to merge the duplicates.

And let China be the only one with scale advantage?

> I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US

The Constitution of the USA prevents states from erecting barriers to inter-state commerce, so I suspect if there were legal barriers, they would have to be at the national level.

There are ways to do the above without specifically restricting inter-state commerce. The CCPA is one example of a state raising the barrier to entry that a business can either comply with or leave the market. I wouldn't exactly call it an ideal situation, but if each individual state created their own version there would certainly be businesses that refuse to do business in certain states rather than dealing with the regulatory headaches.

It seems like adding in these artificial domestic barriers would negatively affect the total stock market in aggregate, by making business less efficient overall. (scale == efficiency).

Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)

Unfortunately it being an utter stupid or terrible idea is no guarantee to stop a law from being passed. Reality always takes it toll however much they insist that it isn't their fault and nobody could have known exactly what they were warned about happening.

You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder, however, how having such boundaries in place would affect exchange of information somehow. That's something I can sense in practice by living in a country where a large portion of the population don't speak english, however most of the tech material is made available in english.

I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.

>perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition

A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.