The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated
I&#x27;m sympathetic but not a video creator, but I wonder why don&#x27;t people band together and sue, or alternatively pressure their state attorneys-general to bring a civil enforcement action? Yes, yes, arbitration clauses, but there&#x27;s a doctrine in law called &#x27;unconscionable contract&#x27; and a demonstrable pattern of unilateral kafkaesque behavior by YT is a good start for any attorney.<p>As I have pointed out over and over <i>market solutions don&#x27;t work</i> when there are huge power&#x2F;capital differentials involved. Hoping some plucky little underdog product&#x2F;service will lead to an exodus isn&#x27;t going to happen.<p>Back in the day, Google ate Yahoo&#x27;s lunch (along with Altavista, Lycos and everyone else) because Google had a genuine search engine (in the form of a graph database) whereas the incumbents were operating directories, and the classification&#x2F;curation couldn&#x27;t keep up with the volume of information being crawled. For those who were not around at the time, it&#x27;s hard to communicate how different the products were. Incumbents let you search but also offered a huge number of categories, like a library catalog. Google looked like a joke website the first time you visited due to the lack of <i>any</i> categorical or navigational options, just this over-confident search field...except that it worked. It was like sorcery.<p>The reason I mention this is because in economics there&#x27;s a concept of <i>elasticity of demand</i>, of how attached you are to a thing you already use or consume. Generally, you want to stick with what works. This is especially true where network effects come into play. Competitors that offer X + some incremental improvement usually fail; their best outcome is that X buys them and incorporates the incremental improvement (which is sometimes the competitors&#x27; ultimate goal). To lure people away from a successful product the additional benefit to the buyer has to be more like 100% than 10% or 20%, and that rarely happens. If you look at Youtube&#x27;s contenders, they fall into specialized categories such as art stuff like Vimeo (extra access control, higher video quality&#x2F; delivery options), Twitch (emphasis on livestreaming and social, especially for gamers), Rumble (for Freeze Peach aficionados), Pornhub and the whole adult entertainment ecosystem, or high-end commercial content streaming.<p>So if you dream of beating YouTube in the market, you need to either occupy a niche they don&#x27;t want to be in (most of which have already been occupied) or offer something that&#x27;s radically different <i>for the consumer</i>. Being distributed&#x2F; FOSS&#x2F; blockchain&#x2F; whatever isn&#x27;t it because only nerds care about that stuff. Nerds don&#x27;t rule the marketplace, even when they build the marketplace: 95% of people <i>do not care</i> how something works or that it serves a higher purpose. It needs to offer a wholly different <i>user experience</i>, and really, it&#x27;s kinda hard to see how you&#x27;re gonna radically rethink TV.<p>You have a better chance to do something amazing in virtual reality or internet navigation in general, and provide a native offering in which Youtube is diminished to the minor status of a channel owner, ie your UI&#x2F;brand is The Thing and YouTube is just a minor service provider icon <i>below the content</i>.<p>So the alternative is to address the situation legally. Monopoly complaints won&#x27;t work, because the nice capitalists at the University of Chicago have institutionalized the idea that monopolies are fine as long as the public is happy, and the huge # of consumers using YouTube vastly outweighs the small # of creators who are pissed off with it, so good luck with your public interest argument. However, there might be some mileage in attacking the contract terms or alleging that YouTube has implicitly defamed creators by suspending them without explanation. Or you could go in a different direction and argue that YouTube is a sort of public utility, though then you need to decide whether you really want online video to be regulated by FCC.<p>Litigation would be expensive and stressful and would need to be a collective rather than individual undertaking, and a selective one at that - folks like Linux Experiment are sympathetic plaintiffs, folks like Logan Paul are not (you may think this shouldn&#x27;t matter, but tough luck, it does). Chances are that such a case would almost certainly fail, but the object would be to make discovery and the trial excruciatingly embarrassing for youtube, which would mean <i>refusing to settle</i> and (probably) looking for specific performance like YT submitting to supervision of some kind in the form of a consent decree, rather than mere compensation. If you just ask them for money you&#x27;ll (maybe) eventually get some but nothing will change, because asking for money is essentially the same as saying whoever has the most money gets to be king of the market and Alphabet has plenty of coins to toss in the direction of the peasants.<p>The potential upside here is not winning in court (a vanishingly unlikely possibility) or getting a big check to shut up and go away (nice and what your lawyers want, but basically selling out your principles), but either a change in the law from Congress (ha ha good luck) or a shift in the public&#x27;s thinking about how contracts should work, the distribution of obligations, and how much market power is acceptable.