PewDiePie’s Battle for the Soul of the Internet
All the comments here are about journalism or politics so I&#x27;ll start a thread about technology instead. The article says this:<p><i>this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web  ... Were there a public protocol that allowed video to be shared as easily as hypertext, there would be no need for YouTube</i><p>But this is a major misunderstanding of the problem, which is not due to the web&#x27;s design but rather the basic incentive issues around the creation of decentralised, public infrastructure.<p>Because of course there <i>is</i> such a public protocol that allows video to be shared as easily as hypertext. It&#x27;s called <i>the web</i>. How does this author think YouTube works, exactly? Anyone can transcode a video, upload it to their personal web server and use the &lt;video&gt; tag. The codecs, the transports, the viewer software, it&#x27;s all free and public.<p>So why don&#x27;t PewDiePie and others like them do that? Why do they all flock to YouTube and then create massive dramas over YouTube&#x27;s policies? And by the way, I ask these rhetorical questions as someone who is no fan of Google&#x27;s recent turn towards blocking and censorship of conservative views.<p>Well the questions are rhetorical because the answers are obvious. They stick with YouTube and don&#x27;t even go elsewhere if they get silenced because the value YouTube is providing them is staggeringly huge. YouTube isn&#x27;t merely a way to publish video. It&#x27;s a huge, no questions asked bandwidth and CPU subsidy. It&#x27;s the technology to instantly handle serving to planet-scale populations. It&#x27;s commenting and voting that&#x27;s defending against spamming and other forms of DoS. It&#x27;s discovery and sharing. It&#x27;s editing tools and analytics and most of all it&#x27;s advertising - <i>monetisation</i> is what we lack public infrastructure for, not video serving.<p>And why do we lack public protocols for all these things? Because creating YouTube is a hell of a lot of work for many people and they want to get paid for their skills. Which inherently means they need to own the result of their work, and ownership implies control. Private property rights, that&#x27;s capitalism and incentives 101.<p>I&#x27;ve worked on decentralisation related software for a long time and still do, because there are certain areas where it can really help. But you can&#x27;t inherently point the finger at existing technologies and say &quot;if only they were better, everything would be decentralised&quot;. No, it doesn&#x27;t work like that. It&#x27;s a failed analysis of the problem. Create decentralised tech like the &lt;video&gt; tag or git, and a YouTube and GitHub will arise around it and re-centralise it all by providing value the public protocol does not. Society <i>wants</i> centralisation because most of the time, the abuses of power it allows are collectively considered low cost relative to the benefits of the extra features and competence the centralisation allows.<p>This doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s all useless. Git being decentralised is helpful even though everyone has centralised around GitHub: if you <i>do</i> want to move your code off of GitHub, you are just a &quot;git push&quot; away from having all your history and branches painlessly transferred to GitLab or your own server. Sure, that won&#x27;t help your issues or pull requests, but that doesn&#x27;t take away from the fact that source code is now properly decentralised and that&#x27;s still better than before. So we should continue to develop decentralised technology, whilst understanding that it won&#x27;t result in everyone using purely decentralised systems.