In The Philippines, my understanding is that they have ample bandwidth via Korea and other countries in the region. But the reason they have such expensive terrible internet is because of a lack of net neutrality and deregulation.

The cellphone duopoly sells "YouTube passes", that entitle you to get unthrottled YouTube for brief periods of time.

I wonder if a proxy could be made to encode data as video to put in a YouTube livestream. You'd still need an uplink but the upload bandwidth usage is a fraction of the download one for typical Internet usage.

Yes, that is definitely possible and might make for a fun project. Use stego to make the livestream look innocuous and apply heavy ECC, further resisting censorship and arousal of suspicion. I think this is the closest I've seen to a public implementation of that idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166332

You'd still need an uplink but the upload bandwidth usage is a fraction of the download one for typical Internet usage.

Perhaps the chat/comments (once again with heavy stego/encryption) would work?

Related and older idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

Net neutrality isn’t related to Internet speeds. Good speeds are just driven by having competition.

Comcast was suddenly able to provide 1gbps for the same price as an 80mbps package when a fiber competitor entered the market.

Even with net neutrality, there is no incentive to make the internet better as an operator if you’re operating in a government granted monopoly/duopoly market.

Net neutrality eliminates the ability of an operator to discriminate and offer uncapped data or higher speed passes to just YouTube.

> the cost of Internet traffic is dominated by the undersea cables at their borders.

This is rarely the case. It's usually monopoly providers and/or people speaking historically when it was expensive because it was rarer.

India and the Philippines both have more than adequate international bandwidth.