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I have deep aversion to paying Google, for multiple reasons. I would be far more likely to pay actual content creators, not middleman and infrastructure provider.
Interesting, I sort of grudgingly pay Google for infrastructure services (like fiber). I like their services there, and I'd be happy to pay that amount to most companies; it's that it's Google that bothers me, because I'm bothered by much of the rest of their business and politics.
I wonder if there are themes that we can connect to other topics. Maybe it's really the "middleman" role that people don't like. Though, I imagine this is connected to the general concern that, on the internet, middlemen tend to be successful due to network effects rather than making better products. Everyone goes to YouTube, because all the content is on YouTube, not necessarily because they built a better platform for distributing video. (Though, their platform is quite good at distributing video... save for all the ad annoyances.)
So, perhaps this is a bit of a hangover of the FOSS movement. If it's just a thing that performs a middleman function, people think that it could be mostly provided by a FOSS solution. I suspect that this intuition is mostly not wrong; it would be easy to have a FOSS solution that replaces YouTube. Wikipedia is similar here. One salient difference is that storing/hosting all that video is much more costly than storing/hosting Wikipedia. We just had the Elon-inspired hullabaloo about how much money is going to Wikipedia, so perhaps it's the same intuition.
Perhaps, then, setting aside one of the primary problems with FOSS (that the proprietary folks try super hard to make their products incompatible with FOSS solutions; see Microsoft trying desperately to "update" their file types to break Linux software), we could think about what "ideal" solutions to this problem could look like that comport with people's intuition.
I think everyone's happy to pay content providers in some way. And everyone is happy to pay for the storing/hosting costs in some way. The question is, "What is the right mechanism to get these prices paid without succumbing to huge monopoly rents of a network-entrenched middleman?"
One idea would be to break the trust into two different components. One component is only responsible for the base hosting of things, and the other is responsible for attaching ads to content. That is, all of the ad revenue would go to the creators and Company A, who selects which ads to show for which videos. Then, Company B would be responsible just for deliverying the content provided by Company A/creators to the end user. This would still leave the question of how to pay for Company B. Long ago, back in 2009 when YouTube was bleeding money, Slate estimated, YouTube's badwidth costs at about $360M/yr. Ignoring the licensing fees they cite (because hypothetical Company B won't have those), their top number was about $450M/yr. Back in 2009. It's certaintly more expensive now. Let's just say it's $500M-1B/yr, just for data storage/distribution. How do we actually figure out how to pay for that without stuffing Company B right back into the ad chain? Even the bloated amount of donations that go to Wikipedia wouldn't scratch the surface of that price tag.
For audio podcasts, competition can work really well and easily. The cost of storing/distributing just audio is far cheaper, so creators/folks like Company A could easily and cheaply be hosted on several different podcast apps. But with video, in order to have multiple competing storing/distribution companies, you'd either need to have all of them simultaneously dumping $500M-$1B/yr into storage/distribution, or more likely, the landscape would fracture into, "We're the storage/distribution company that has exclusive rights to Creators X, Y, and Z," that we're seeing with other streaming services. I'm not sure I'm actually seeing any good options.
As I sort of mentioned above, Google is no stranger to the idea of commoditizing your complement in order to make sure that it's not fucked/annoying to people enough to cause problems for your own business. That's the idea of Google Fiber. They're perfectly happy to run it as a very simple, no bullshit, fee-for-subscription model. They don't inject ads into the general traffic that comes into your house on the fiber. But the only folks with any sort of pull in the matter who would want to commoditize the storing/distributing complement would be the creators. Unfortunately, they're diffuse enough that it is hard to imagine them being able to come together and say, "Enough is enough. YouTube's pushing of ever more ads and taking bigger proportions are cutting into our share, too. We should band together, all contribute some amount to set up a true competitor that either doesn't have a subscription cost or has a minimial one, but which is foundationally committed to not adding ads beyond what the individual creator chooses to add.
This would probably start off looking like a worse proposition than YouTube to most creators. "You want me to handle my own ads and pay to have you host my content? Right now, YouTube automatically does the ad bullshit for me, and I just get a check, not write one." So, I imagine that significant capital would have to be risked to keep prices for them very low while independent ad companies could develop which "handle the ad component" for them. Would be very difficult to get off the ground.
Without, of course, just government anti-trust efforts decreeing that Google split up YouTube hosting/distributing in some way from the broader business. But I'm really not sure how exactly they'd be able to get a decree to work here either.
With Google I hate several of things they did. Mostly free software adjacent stuff, latest case is so called "web environment integrity" (and by integrity they mean that corporations can control how your browser behaves).
And they are simply overly large and overly powerful. I dislike idea of funding cyberpunk type dystopia, and fully blocking their ads and badgering is not taking much.
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Then turn that into a deep aversion to using their products.
I am not obligated to do this. I am using Youtube without Google ads and without paying and plan to continue it as long as my methods are working. Or until Google turns extremely evil.
I am also in process of migrating away one of services that become paid relatively recently.
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Why not propose to build our own internet while you're at it?
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