If bandwidth was symmetric, this would never have happened.<p>Technically YouTube and other services like it are not needed.  People need a means to distribute their videos on the internet —possibly starting with a link from the web.  With symmetric bandwidth and a suitable peer-to-peer protocol, there would be no need for a centralised service.  Just serve your videos from your home router and be done with it.<p>Now that there&#x27;s millions of authors instead of a single YouTube, copyright notices and subsequent takedowns suddenly becomes much harder.  No more automated process, they have to (e)mail <i>you</i> a legal notice.<p>Sure, they could still go after your ISP, have it spy on your communications, and take down your very internet connection.  However that would cause even more obvious human rights problems (the internet is the only medium through which freedom of speech is a reality —journals, TV, are much too guarded and centralised for the people to actually speak in them), <i>and</i> it would be solved just as easily as the bandwidth problem: stop the monopoly on the internet connections: we need more providers.  Hundreds, thousands of them.<p>It&#x27;s not hard either: to encourage the existence of many small providers, we just have to take down economies of scales in pricing.  One solution would have the state build the lines (such as the fibre), and lease the resulting bandwidth to providers (<i>without</i> bulk offers).<p>---<p>That way, takedowns becomes prohibitively expensive.  As it should be.  Now we can concentrate on taking down the <i>real</i> bad guys.