Many, including myself, have long seen YouTube as a Monopoly that strangles the ability for rivals with its “too good to be true” offer. That being free video hosting forever even if your video gets zero traffic with unlimited storage and good redundancy.
How can anyone compete with that?
European alternatives like Dailymotion would be bankrupt if the average person started uploading, rather than the current unofficial niche of Dailymotion having more easily accessed pirated content.
To compete, a rival need to attract enough big stars to offset ad revenue from almost every other user not even covering storage costs. That already puts European alternatives at a disadvantage.
However, YouTube can afford to serve 8K UHD videos by getting ISPs to install caching servers for free. Unless your startup is already large enough, you will pay bandwidth costs YouTube doesn’t.
The selective allowance of large (mainly) US companies being allowed to get free bandwidth on ISP networks which artificially lowers big tech bandwidth costs is a massive net neutrality violation that no one cares about.
So YouTube already has the network effect and (nearly) free bandwidth. A combination nearly impossible to compete with. The EU could level the playing field by banning selective caching, but they don’t want to piss off big ISPs who also don’t want to pay for bandwidth.
Europe needs to make YouTube face up to the ultimate unsustainability of hosting 0 view videos forever by banning any subsidies from Alphabet. There also needs to be a ban on selective caching by ISPs (open caching that any website can use or none) as Europe can’t compete if the Americans are giving free bandwidth while forcing European start-ups to pay (A massive problem for video hosting).
Europe also needs to force public intuitions and public broadcasters off American platforms if they have any hope of moving the public towards European alternatives.
Published: 20th February 2025