Comment on Any idea what Google are doing? Is this because I dont use Chrome (use Firefox)? I've no adblockers.
honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months agoConsidering that YouTube is as dominant as it is today because of the well-documented network effect[1], you can consider your use of YouTube instead of a competitor in and of itself a payment because it lets them keep their monopoly on video distribution. YouTube knows this, which is why they were so lenient in their early years - if they started off being strict, people would’ve left earlier and made YouTube’s future as a monopoly more uncertain because of a demand for competitors.
Maybe instead of justifying their profit-seeking, we should demand more oversight and democratic say over how YouTube as a monopoly operates? Kind of like how in Germany and Slovenia, workers get 50% of the seats on the board of corporation and get to have a say in how a business operates? Alike many other European countries with varying %es of the board seats, like Norway and Sweden where it’s 33%, or Finland where it’s 20%. [2]
Otherwise, don’t be surprised when YouTube starts going after creator profits next. Something they’re using to justify going after adblock users now.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect [2] en.wikipedia.org/…/Worker_representation_on_corpo…
Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 8 months ago
Unfortunately, all it takes is one right wing nut job to liquidate the positions and sell them to corporate interests.
See the decimation of Canada's National Energy Board under Modi and Poilievre's showrunner, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The board, by law, has to be half oil industry and half environmentalists. He fired all of the sane people and sold the empty spots to the oil industry.
honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
If one person has control over what people sit on the board, that’s not democratic. I did specify “democratic” above, so I think it’s an important point to hammer in here. We could make a significant part (if not even the whole) of the board be elected worker managers. In an actual democracy, a single person doesn’t have the power to boot people they don’t like out.