I’m not sure the comment calling for regulation is a corporate shill. It’s a pretty level-headed look at things imo, because the truth is YT cannot afford to operate for free. We live in a system that just doesn’t allow that, for better or worse. Unfortunately, the way we went about funding things on the internet (outside of ridiculous amounts of capital flowing to startups for years, which doesn’t really apply to YT/Google) was ads, and they have gotten wildly out of hand. This is on top of an insane amount of data harvesting. We have to face the reality that any major, data-heavy platform like YT is going to need significant revenue.

We need a solution to either lower the cost of (opening things up for individuals to host), or more efficiently fund, services we like if they’re going to stick around in the current state of the world. Even if we say “google can eat the cost” we’re still putting all our faith in the goodwill of an entity that is designed to do the opposite of what we’re asking. That’s begging for issues.

Peer-to-peer stuff is the best solution I’ve seen, or self-hosting. I’m far from an expert, but from what I understand the tech just isnt there yet for it to become the norm. All that data has to go somewhere, and storage is prohibitively expensive at a certain point.