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Another symptom of a monopol. If peertube or the likes was a full blown alternative, people would just quit youtube over this, putting the squeeze on google to
by OneTimePetes 5y ago
Another symptom of a monopol.
If peertube or the likes was a full blown alternative, people would just quit youtube over this, putting the squeeze on google to clean up its act.
- acdha 5y agoIt’s not that simple: YouTube has a huge natural lock-in because videos use lots of bandwidth and Google’s advertisers are willing to pay for that. Peer to peer systems struggle to offer a competitive a competitive experience because few people are able/willing to volunteer significant bandwidth or take on the personal liability for serving content which is copyrighted or otherwise illegal. They’ll work okay for a hugely popular video but fall off the cliff for the long-tail of niche interests and there aren’t enough people who care about it enough to make “YouTube but slower and less reliable” work in general.
- coldacid 5y agoYeah. Essentially, YouTube is all but a natural monopoly given today's legal and technical environment. Unfortunately, it doesn't get the oversight that natural monopolies are supposed to have to prevent abuses like these.
- acdha 5y agoThat’s my take as well: regulation and liability for errors are the most realistic way to fix this. Even if ISPs were required to offer symmetric bandwidth I don’t see anywhere near enough people even being interested in serving other people’s content to make P2P work, which makes me feel old for remembering how cool the BitTorrent launch seemed before I understood the social aspects of the problem.