Imagine There's No YouTube

http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/Imagine-There-s-No-YouTube

by jchrisa • 16 years ago

82 73 16 years ago

jdminhbg2• 16 years ago

Beyond the hand-waving about "big industry" and "corporate agendas," there's not much here beyond the willingness to endorse authoritarianism in the service of encouraging the style of internet sharing the author prefers.

More serious is the apparent blitheness with which the author assumes that only big companies will be affected by speech regulations. On the contrary, it's normally small operators who are intimidated into shutting down by speech regulations like DMCA or the late, unlamented COPA. The Google in Italy case is newsworthy precisely because the government there bullied an entity with the resources to try to fight back.

jchrisa7• 16 years ago

So you'd rather be protected by the feudal lord (Google) than stand on your own? Make no mistake that's what you're saying.

jdminhbg2• 16 years ago

No, I'm saying it's highly unlikely that the "king" is going to shut down the "feudal lord" and then let me, the "peasant," do whatever I want to.

archgoon2• 16 years ago

I don't think that I would describe Google as a feudal lord, what with it not having the power to really do anything to me except deny me it's services. I have sworn no vows of fealty that force me to wage war on their behalf, with execution for dereliction of said vows. Even if I were an employee of theirs, I would still be allowed to quit.

Now, am I happy to let Google fight legal battles that I agree with that I can't fight on my own, due to lack of resources and standing? Yes.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

I love couchdb and what jchrisa is doing there, but this wrong on a variety of levels IMO.

First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anything, let alone "civilians", so billions of web servers on the edge of the network is simply a no-go unless and until doing so becomes appliance-esque (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).

Second, 99% of users and cumulative usage time is spent consuming, not producing stuff.

Third, this is just crazy:

"""The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about."""

There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.

crux_• 16 years ago

Why is it crazy? It's completely true when you take into account that he wasn't advocating a "means of production" that you rent (aka hosting) but one that you actually own.

pyre5• 16 years ago

But he also advocated that the one that you own (the appliance) use hosting services (aka 'the cloud') for backup and distribution purposes. Though he does advocate that such cloud services do deserve safe-harbor protection.

I feel there is a disconnect with the 'landlord' analogy here. The author feels that the 'landlord' is the hardware/internet connection provider/host, while the grandparent poster feels that the YouTube also qualifies as a 'landlord' that is renting out space for people to display their videos (where the 'rent' is the ability to display adverts).

jchrisa7• 16 years ago

I actually said I think services like S3 / EC2 / Rackspace should have safe harbor protection, as they are as content-agnostic as possible under the law (like landlords, not nightclub owners.)

tensafefrogs• 16 years ago

So then by this reasoning, YouTube would be ok if they allowed any content and not just videos?

jchrisa7• 16 years ago

As far as making the tech easy for civilians, it turns out that's what I spend the majority of my time doing. Slowly. Working my way up the stack takes time.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

And I'm 110% behind that effort -- but on its own merits, not as an upshot of "the old regime" losing safe harbor protections.

rflrob• 16 years ago

While I certainly respect the work you're doing, I think there is still a long way to go before the appliance model of serving becomes feasible.

The question, then, should be what do we do in the mean time? Would shutting down the YouTubes of the world actually hasten the advent of server appliances? I'm skeptical.

I also have trouble imagining how new social networking-type applications spread in a world where we have personal servers. The next YouTube/Facebook/Whatever will now have to write their software for a variety of different home servers (and there almost certainly will be a moderate-to-large number of incompatible devices), then convince people to install and correctly configure these apps, update them somewhat regularly to fix security holes, etc. Given the non-zero fraction of people who have trouble simply logging into Facebook, I think we're still a long ways off, and stand to benefit from the rich communities provided by simple, corporate-run networks.

swernli• 16 years ago

I think the author makes a similar point (about third party hosting services needing safe harbor) when he points out that Amazon EC2 is like the landlord, who of course can't be held responsible for underage drinking at the club. I agree that appliance-esque simplicity is what is needed to allow/encourage "civilians" to host their own content, and I hazard to guess that the author would too. And what is stopping us from creating that?

I remember in my freshman year of college when students discovered the library sharing feature in iTunes. Word spread pretty quickly, and soon most folks were using their laptops to do what the Zune tried to popularize: sampling the music of peers for free over the network in order to connect over musical taste and find new bands. I think what the author points out is that other programs have similar features (such as iPhoto being able to share a folder of images to the network), but they are limited to local networks and can't be reached from everywhere. Why not institute a system that allows that same "share my photos" check box to make them available on the web? Then I, and many of my friends who have faced the same problem, won't have to create a facebook account just to be able to see a friend's wedding pictures...

lincolnq• 16 years ago

Yeah, I agree somewhat.

The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff.

If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc.

So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.

greyman• 16 years ago

As I think about it now, it seems to me that the author is into something here. Everyone cries that this is attack of the freedom of expression, while it is actually not. It is just an attack to automated content hosting like Youtube.

Really, what would happen if content providers will be held liable for uploaded content? The megasites like Youtube couldn't legally exist. And the author argues that this is maybe not a bad thing, which is quite a fresh view of the issue.

Let's use this analogy. Imagine someone was able to build automated mega pub, where anyone could come and buy beer from robot innkeeper. But the pub would be such huge, that it won't be humanly possible to check if everyone was legally allowed to drink alcohol. So the owner would say: We have so much customers that it is not within our means to check if everyone is of 18+ age. So let's anyone go in and drink beer, and if we are notified that someone is underage, we will promptly kick him off. But we are not liable, since there should be a freedom to drink beer. So what do you think - would such a pub be allowed to exists in a real world? So then, why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone can do illegal things anonymously there? (Of course that was just a reasoning exercise, I am not advocating Youtube ban here. ;-)) But overall, I tend to agree with the author, good article.

knome• 16 years ago

I think a better example would be an art show. Say someone starts an art show that lets anyone display their work inside. It's a huge art show with tens of thousands of persons setting up their pieces over acres of land. Is the proprietor of the space responsible for picking through the inordinate amount of material brought in, checking that all pieces are owned by the person entering and that none are copies or otherwise unworthy of showing? Is it enough that they kick out artists when they receive reports of ill doing?

Youtube is not a pub selling beer. They are a virtual location that allows any artist to hang their work. They benefit by selling space for advertisements around the booths. When notified of an artist showing an illegal or otherwise unacceptable piece, they remove it. I see this as a perfectly reasonable situation.

The metaphor used in interacting with websites is that of a place. I think the metaphor is a good one.

Hosting a space for other people to use should not make one de facto guilty if others abuse it. One could argue for negligence if they had no reporting system or ignored it. But so far as I have read, this is not the case.

janl2• 16 years ago

So you're saying you're not willing to "imagine"? :)

If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

I can imagine very well, I would just rather not have that vision tied up with advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions.

By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current regime. :-)

Semiapies6• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151478

pyre5• 16 years ago

> (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).

The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions.

> There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.

But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.

natrius2• 16 years ago

So hosting services deserve safe harbor protections, but hosting services that provide a nice front-end to your data (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, etc.) don't.

This is wrong. I think the internet would be a better place if it were easier for people to run their own servers, but that doesn't mean we should make it more difficult for hosted services to operate.

freetard• 16 years ago

Big entities are still good on the web, see wikipedia, openstreetmap and yes, even youtube, liveleak or twitter/identi.ca (iran, scandals etc).

This case could also help many torrent sites to survive http://torrentfreak.com/can-google-secure-a-safe-haven-for-b... . Where I live there is no netflix, no itunes, no hulu. And most people wouldn't have the money for those anyway. So torrent sites play a great role in democratizing culture (good and bad culture I know).

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

This reminds me of the position a very good friend of mine tends to defend, that we'd all be better off if we lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. None of the stresses of the modern world to constrain us, no sitting at a desk for most of the day, no growth hormones in our food, no complex economy founded on unrealistic debt, no unavoidable, unsustainable network of high-volume petroleum combustion to poison our rivers and lungs.

Despite his having a couple of degrees in anthropology and talking about this long before Avatar was ever in theaters... I remain unconvinced. Even without all the mundane problems of modern life, most of us in the developed world don't have to worry about our immediate survival on a day-to-day basis. Society may have made an enormous number of tradeoffs to get to where we are, but I still have to call it a net positive.

That's kind of how I feel about this article.

madebylaw2• 16 years ago

most of us in the developed world don't have to worry about our immediate survival on a day-to-day basis

Neither do hunters and gatherers. Turns out that hunter gatherers (at least the ones surveyed) just sit around most days and rarely worry about their immediate survival either. If you're interested in more information, this is a seminal work for anthropologists studying this topic:

http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

I would agree that, for me, life in modern society is a net positive, but that is a personal decision shaped by my own cultural biases. Is modern society inherently better than a hunter gatherer one? No, I don't think so.

dantheman3• 16 years ago

I think that modern society is inherently better since no one lives the hunter gatherer one when given a chance. There are still places where one could go and hunt/gather food etc but I don't know of anyone that does that.

jrockway• 16 years ago

What's good about the Internet is that it's global. That means that if one country or one group of countries tries to censor something, the host can always be moved elsewhere. Since we have things like Tor now, censoring the Internet itself is not possible; you can only go after individual violators. And if those are outside of the law, you just have to deal with them -- nothing can be done to stop it.

On that note, clearly we should just launch a satellite that beams youtube videos to everyone. Since shooting down a satellite is illegal under various international laws, this should be a safe place to host your autotuned lolcats.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

Summary:

1) "Hating facism is too cliche"

2) "waaahhhh-big-evil-corporations"

3) "I miss animated GIFs and rainbow borders, grandma needs to handcraft an impossible-to-find-pre-web1pointOh site for her cat videos and not use EvilTube. Will be way cool."

hmarquardt• 16 years ago

Gosh, I'm willing to imagine ... and yes if it were easy to generate quality content, index-able, search-able and security issues didn't require admin level skills to publish devolving to peer based sharing would be great ...

But the aggregators exist because the content consumers want consistency, ease of discovery and all the admin heavy lifting done for them ...

jchrisa7• 16 years ago

Good work imagining! Now go make something! Building tools for the personal web is no harder than writing a Hacker News clone. It just requires more imagination.

dangrossman• 16 years ago

In this "personal web" where everyone hosts their own content on their own web server, how do we as content consumers continue to find the 100 cat videos a day we want to watch? Someone's going to have to aggregate them from around the world, there's too much to aggregate by hand, and then we're in the same position we are now. Merely linking to the wrong material is enough to get you convicted in the USA, so there's no protection in that the files linked to are now on many servers -- the aggregator has the same risk as in the industrial web.

loup-vaillant3• 16 years ago

Links probably should have safe harbour anyway, because there is no way to control the other end of the link. So your lolcat could be find via a search engine, or other aggregation service you may have subscribed to.

malkia• 16 years ago

If it wasn't for Jackson's tit, it would've been... (Read the YouTube story).

wvenable• 16 years ago

The article glosses over a significant part of Google's argument: "To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed."

Why exactly where these people charged with anything? What kind of ridiculous law is this? I feel this has less to do with free speech and internet freedom than it does with common sense.

dantheman3• 16 years ago

So I agree with the intent of the article that pushing distribution to the edge is a noble goal. But safe-harbors should be expanded -- why should a company have to police it's users. That seems ridiculous. If the country feels something is wrong it should send a letter or police officer to make sure that it is taken down, but that is all.

archgoon2• 16 years ago

Question, if I host a blog, am I responsible for all comments on the blog? Does this mean that all comments must be held for moderation before they are posted?

This would kill hacker news and a large number of other sites, and is not solved by self-hosting.

natrius2• 16 years ago

Everyone could host their own comments, and blogs would only accept links as comments on their posts.

  </sarcasm>

Semiapies6• 16 years ago

Judging by cases in a few countries, bloggers would then be responsible for anything on the page at that link.

If you reversed that, with commentors posting comments with links to the post, you'd then need aggregation to read comments, making aggregator sites and software makers vulnerable.

It doesn't really stop until we devolve down to a pre-search engine web. But since "we" will be reshaping things, that'll be all good, right?

jarsj2• 16 years ago

If police can walk inside your hotel and stop people from breaking laws, they should be able to do at your website.

What we should build is a universally accepted protocol for government policing. Every UGC website must implement it. The government gets some police accounts which they can use to block objected content. Every government manages their jurisdiction. There can be treaties and smart organizations like NSA who do things automatically.

May be futuristic, but it will happen.

shrughes• 16 years ago

No they shouldn't, simply because police shouldn't be able to enforce immoral laws. If there were a morality field generator that magically allowed only the enforcement of morally sound laws within their sphere of operation, it would be a good idea to build a bunch of them and turn them on.

jarsj2• 16 years ago

If companies can than why not the police?

There would be guidelines and you could take them to court for breaking them. There will be new sections in the law and new court judgments to base actions upon. It would evolve. Let there be a special department trained and specialized in this.

All I am saying is pass the onus to government and give them a way to do it.

ekiru• 16 years ago

One of the potential advantages of the large UGC platforms like Youtube is as a risk pool. Would it be easier for me to fight off an attempt to censor me, or would it be easier for Google to fight off an attempt to censor their users? Note that I'm not saying these platforms necessarily do perform this function, but many do to at least some extent. The thing that bothers me most about this case is that Google seem to have provided Italian law enforcement with the personal information of the criminals. Could you imagine the outcry that would happen if there were a case where AT&T kept recordings of some one's phone calls and used those recordings to turn that person over to the police after the police somehow discovered that some one(without even knowing who specifically they are looking for) was using an AT&T phone as part of criminal activities? Obviously, most people will accept some amount of wiretapping, but I'd expect fewer people to accept either this hypothetical situation or the situation with Google in Italy.

wedesoft• 16 years ago

Decentralising social networks, hosting, and search is desirable.

But I can't see anything positive in the decision of the Italian court. Remember this is Italy. It's Berlusconi's country. And the guy is hellbent on eradicating independent media. He won't stop at shutting down Youtube.

Being able to anonymously publish stuff is a very important aspect of the freedom of speech!

dpatru• 16 years ago

Youtube wants to have the right to profit from the contents of its service, but it doesn't want to be held responsible for damages the content causes.

A landlord who leases his premises to the bar owner for a fixed sum per month is not responsible for the behavior of drunk customers. He's just renting the premises. But the bar owner who makes money on the drinks should be responsible.

The law should assign responsibility to Youtube in a similar way. If Youtube is merely a "landlord" it should not be held responsible for copyright infringement. If, however, it profits from the individual videos that are uploaded, it's hard to see why it should not also bear the loss caused by copyright infringement.

tolmasky• 16 years ago

I think what this article don't realize is that Italy's ruling is BENEFICIAL to large corporations, not some sort of "equalizing" factor. Every time some sort of ridiculous regulation has been put in place the big corporations have had the capital to comply, and the individuals have been given even more roadblocks to compete. The lack of imagination is not in not imagining a peer to peer web, but rather in not imagining a Google that can innovate around these restrictions.

Take this safe harbor thing. Let's say that it becomes abolished for sites like YouTube across the board. Do you think Google would say "oh too bad, time to shut down the site". Of course not. Google has the money to pay for a million mechanical-turk style people to view every video, and the innovative prowess to create programs that would do filtering as well. The end result would be that they would probably err on the side of being too cautious, and we'd have a YouTube with far less content.

However, the true problem here is that if I now wanted to compete with YouTube, it would be impossibly difficult due solely to the liability of it all. I can't afford to have a huge staff looking at every video, or massive servers running analysis on every upload. So all of a sudden what you've done is SOLIDIFY YouTube's stranglehold on content.

Not to mention that you've all of a sudden given Google the perfect excuse for denying any content they want, they can now just hide behind "liability concerns". We've already seen that companies abuse DMCA takedowns with fair use, of course there would be abuse of this as well.

Osmose• 16 years ago

This is why I think the author supports the idea of giving the power to share videos to everyone, rather than the current model of having someone else share your videos for you once you upload them. You certainly can afford to know that the videos you alone share are legal or not.

It's not about making a competing service, its about self-service.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

The simple answer: if YouTube and other similar sites didn't exist. We may not have had some of the major innovations of the last 10 years

definitely independant music would be way behind where it is now.

Semiapies6• 16 years ago

When people fall prey to one-true-wayism (as the article does), they wipe out a lot of possibilities.

teamfresh• 16 years ago

no YouTube - just MeTube =)

asnyder• 16 years ago

I believe Opera is trying this concept in their latest web browser, http://unite.opera.com/, although I don't think it's gaining much traction. I believe they're bundling an easy to use web server where you can self hosts and share your content, media, etc.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

Dude is all kinds of confused. It looks to me like he's trying to create an intellectual justification for his emotional dislike of big websites. I can't fathom a legitimately rational explanation for why EC2 is right and proper and good, but YouTube et al are evil and should be hounded out of business by force of law. They both provide essentially the same service, it's just that YouTube make it accessible to everyone.

Sounds like fairly straightforward neo-luddite snobbery to me, the same kind of thinking that made all those Whole Foods customers so angry at Wal-Mart for selling organic vegetables. I think his real agenda is that he wants to turn back the clock to before the Eternal September and take us back to a geek-only internet. I think he resents all of the ordinary people and their cat videos.

Also, no fully peer-to-peer architecture can serve content with low enough latency for web browsing (as Freenet so ably demonstrates) and none ever will because of Parkinson's Law, but that's largely beside the point.

Imagine There's No YouTube

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