All the examples you provide have to do with tangible, physical things. Tech is in some sense special because we're dealing with intangibles. It costs a bad actor next to nothing to upload the same video with harmful content to YouTube a thousand times, a million times even. And YouTube has to deal with all of this.

That's why they still use physical ballots in most elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical things the costs for a bad actor to do bad things at scale balloon up.

But Tech also enjoys the benefits of this. You make a product once, sell it thousands of times. Or allow thousands/millions of people access without much overhead. I'm simplifying here of course, but compared to e.g. a machine which you have to produce new for each customer I think we are in a very good situation. And with that advantage comes a price tech should be forced to pay.

But a bad actor can only do so much if manual reviews are involved. If they’re a completely new account because their previous accounts have been banned, accessing on a new device because their previous Alphabet-surveilled fingerprint had been banned, or on a VPN because their IP has been banned, YouTube could just implement manual review which would slow such a bad actor down. And if the intent is to clog up the manual review process with whatever copies of a single illegal video Alphabet we already have technology that is used to automatically identify specific videos or images and remove them, usually for purposes of preventing the spread of illegal depictions of children.

If you change the MAC address on your cable modem you can get tons of different IPs. Same thing with cellular networks. With raspberryPis so cheap, fingerprints don't work that well for all devices.

There are relatively few people capable of doing this compared to the population of the world that uses YouTube, and there’s even fewer people who, even with capacity, will be doing this just to upload illegal content into YouTube. I think this sizes down the problem of manual review quite easily.

So what you’re saying is that their’s market for obtaining different ip numbers.. its almost exactly like a commercial VPN service

IPs are very cheap. Botnets are huge and residential IPs are easy to come by.

"We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff."

Ever buy strawberries?

"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."

Train conductors often check tickets after the train has started moving.

"Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."

Climate change. Dirty streets.

Very much so. Tech companies have a way of confusing "this is difficult" with "this is impossible," or "this is impossible" with "this isn't free," or "this is impossible" with "we don't want to."

They are incentivized to have that confusion. So no surprise.

There are few other industries where users expect to get everything for free.

And those things are paid for. It would be perfectly reasonable if you had to pay per minute for uploading video and people had to pay for a subscription to watch it. That's just not what is expected for a mass platform today.

Vimeo has an “uploader pays” system (of sorts), and, while it prevents garbage on the platform, it stops creators from wanting to use it when YouTube is free.

Yes. It's of course a perfectly valid (and widely-used) model to pay for hosting. But, by and large, only "serious" users who probably otherwise have a business model will do so. And there will inevitably be far less content on the platform.

On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so much of the Web has come to be about "free" access (though paying for access with attention and time) but that does come from the perspective of someone who would be able and happy to pay with money instead.

It's expected because the expectations are set by the existing platforms. And the reason why Google specifically is actively promoting those expectations, is that it makes ads the only viable business model for content creators; and Google's primary source of income is their ad services, so it maintains their dominant market position.

"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."

This happens in some public transport operators already.

It's argued that in some cities public transport systems the price of the ticket doesn't cover the cost of its own infrastructure, the machines to buy them, the ones to validate them the salaries of the agents verifying, etc. It can be more cost effective to drop the concept of ticket and make it a free public service.

I agree with all that, but some central governments such as Turkey go to great lengths to make public transport a paid service. The best public transport is the free one indeed.

There's a massive difference between centralized production of physical goods vs user-generated digital assets. Scale itself becomes the challenge.