With a $5 monthly fee and no way to upload your own videos, Nebula is most directly competing against Netflix, not YouTube. A few top creators might be able to make that work, but most won't.

And no free trial w/o giving credit card info. Yeah, hard pass.

That is very normal. It’s to prevent people from just creating accounts multiple times to never have to pay.

A $20 gift card is great for those things. Then, it doesn’t matter whether you remember to cancel.

Use privacy.com. It's a godsend.

The problem with these techniques is discover ability. How do you build an online audience without paying google for advertisements?

Then perhaps the solution isn't for politicians to demand that YouTube be separated from Google/Alphabet, but instead demand that users on YouTube be able to discover videos on other sites.

I see no reason why the search feature within YouTube couldn't return videos that people were hosting on their personal sites or on competitors to YouTube (including Twitch VODs and livestreams). Even subscriptions and recommendations could work across platforms.

YouTube could still run adverts in/on the videos, and the revenue from that would be split with the site where the video was actually published. For a greater share of the ad revenue, YouTube could also offer to stream (a copy of) the video from their own servers.

Even if sites (or Multi-Channel Networks) had to pay a $1000 fee to be included in this system, and YouTube kept its rules about moderation and demonetisation, it would still greatly improve discoverability and hopefully competition generally.