Youtube benefits from being everyone's go-to site for finding video content. Keeping that monopoly of mindshare is worth far more to them than any short sighted profit maximisation.

as recent legal action shows companies benefit from being monopolies up until the point that they monopolize too much.

Yeah that's not some kind of general rule. This is because the US legal system in particular lets this happen. And in fact, the US legal system works so badly that it often still benefits companies long after they've monopolized too much, causing all sorts of damage to consumers and other companies that actually did nothing wrong.

Presumably as a condition of being allowed to hold their monopoly status and treat the (publicly developed) internet as a source of annuities.

Isn't streaming live video? It seems to me that youtube is exactly in archival video and hardly in streaming. But it's a big site so maybe a lot of people use it in ways I don't know.

Streaming is not exclusively live video. Streaming is viewing the file as it downloads. As a stream. The alternative is what we did in the dark ages. Download the entire file before beginning playback.

Even in the dark ages (e.g. '97) we could watch the fragment of the avi videos as they downloaded.

‘97 is classic antiquity. The dark ages came later, after civilization fell. We obtained WMVs from Kazaa because that’s all that was left.

I myself preferred realplayer ("buffering...") and its more advanced cousin realplayer G2.

From what I remember WMVs were mostly fake so I would never download them

WMVs can embed instructions on where to grab codecs or authorization to play the content in the multimedia. Back in the day if you played WMV with windows media player this could be used to pwn your computer.

damn. then I've been living through those ages. I feel old.

Because it is the right thing to do.

Actually, you can host any amount of pirated video content on youtube, as long as its "visibility" set to "private"...