Even the web is a platform now. You won't do well running a website if Google Search and Chrome don't favour it. Depending on how you plan to get your initial customers, you may hit a sizeable roadblock if Google Ads or Facebook Ads decide that they don't want to run your ads.
Windows and MacOS are also platforms.
Even pretty big companies depend upon platforms. Take the example of Epic getting booted from Apple's app store. Facebook have not been able to get Apple to approve Facebook Gaming.
If you want to start an ecommerce business, are you meant to build your own rather than using Amazon & Shopify?
It doesn't make sense to not participate on platforms. What does make sense is to consider what it means for your business. In certain extreme cases like YouTube or Apple's app store, it seems like some degree of regulation may be necessary to prevent the platforms from abusing their position.
One small caveat - the small business owner had no choice in the matter when they moved in 10 years ago. There was only one mall people would actually visit across the entire world. And that mall has a clickwrap agreement for all their rentals, one which includes a clause that says "and we can change this agreement at will and without notice."
You use a platform, that’s on you. It’s never been cheaper or easier to run a website, make videos, and host them.
A regulator tends to lock the status quo into place, it's almost always incumbent friendly... like banking, casinos, tobacco, etc. Remember that Philip Morris benefits greatly from tobacco regulation.
What "good" would be is wrenching video out of YouTube's Kafkaesque hands.
Have we given up on decentralisation?
I can't believe this needs to be said literally every time one of these types of articles gets posted on HN: if you build your business on top of someone else's platform, and have no contracts in place to protect your interests, your business's existence is completely at the whim of the platform owners.
I wish we lived in a world where the Googles of the internet had sane, transparent, easily-appealable processes for these sorts of things. But we don't, and absent government regulation, we probably aren't going to. People need to take these sorts of risks into account when deciding how to run their businesses, and have contingency plans.
It's interesting to note that in the landlord/tenant analogy, most jurisdictions have laws in place that prevent tenants from agreeing to such unbalanced, predatory contracts, and give tenants rights even in the absence of any agreement at all. Perhaps we do need something like that on the internet, for some things.