So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
If google maintains its current dominance of search and The Internet in general? I could still see youtube as we know it dying out within the decade, but I think it is “fine”. Chrome/Chromium I see more like Internet Explorer in that it will continue to exist until something new comes out.
But that all assumes that google has near infinite money from ads, analytics, etc. The moment you get rid of that? you now have massive data storage and data availability costs that do not in the slightest bit pay for themselves. MAYBE if every content creator gets told to pound sand they could break even but… then content creators aren’t making new videos and youtube rapidly becomes an archive site and fewer people check in there very single day and ad revenue go down and…
Again, there is a reason that the only companies that have even a snowball’s chance of running massive video sites are the ones who also run massive cloud compute/storage services AND have “side hustles” that make up half the god damned internet. And Microsoft still failed horribly. And twitch/youtube are constantly trying to find ways to actually become semi-profitable without completely losing the userbase.
But all of this “We should break them up” is basically guaranteeing that these services and tools go away pretty fast. Because then they are just money sinks for companies that actually need to profit off said sink.
Obviously pure speculation, but I see google eventually making it much harder to watch older content. Shift the algorithm to prioritize regular uploads and penalize channels where the most watched video is from ten years ago. That will encourage creators to “refresh” their content or outright delist older videos and EVERYONE will blame the youtubers rather than question why. Then, once analytics show that the vast majority of videos that are watched are from the past year or two? “To ensure high availability of 16k videos, we are partially archiving all older videos. If you want to watch Michael Reeves ride his motorcycle through a dust storm, you need to go to the page, click this button, and then wait 30 seconds for it to transfer from archive to the good servers. Sorry for the disruption but… go fuck yourself”.
At which point, bandwidth drops drastically. So does storage. And… it still is not a profitable enterprise but it is a much lower cost to google to maintain.