> Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.

If it's true that it isn't profitable how would anti-trust laws make it better? If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more Youtube. That doesn't seem like a better outcome than what we have today.

So it must be profitable to even begin to consider anti-trust regulation. Personally I think it is profitable although it likely has a very long time to recuperate investments (since it's mostly infrastructure like fiber, peering, caching accelerators, etc).

I think the argument is that YouTube is keeping the "price" artificially low which makes competition untenable. If at some point YouTube "raises their prices" (starts paying out less/takes significant extra money from creators) then you could argue that they were engaging in predatory pricing. I don't think it's true, but if you squint right you might get that impression.

Because then someone who doesn’t have Google’s money could actually compete. It wouldn’t become a huge exercise in dumping.

If Google is subsidizing everyone else’s consumption of video, pricing it below market, that’s a good thing. Someone giving you free money or a discount you b didn’t even need to ask for is a good thing. Dumping out selling below cost harms no one but the seller.

It hurts anyone where the product doesn't meet their needs, and their needs would be met if there were several healthy competitors.

it gives too much political power to Google. If google decide to ban you from youtube, you become non existent.

> If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more YouTube

You have to look back at Microsoft's Antitrust case around Internet Explorer, the were bundling the software into the operating system for free to kill any competition.

It maybe a loss leader but it plays into an overall corporate strategy.

Splitting YouTube off would not trigger it to go bankrupt, market forces would come into play, they'd have to seek revenue and others players would come into the market to offer a competitive offering.

To do what? It has a sort of natural monopoly in that it has network effects. If you broke it up, you'd end up with two unprofitable businesses. There are no shortage of youtube competitors- its not like they're locking out competitors with anticompetitive practices. For livestreaming they dont even have a monopoly because of twitch

How are you going to enforce antitrust upon something that costs 0 to consume and pays some people who post upon it?

I think that ideally the legal problems that lead to stuff like content-id being necessary should be resolved so that you could theoretically have competitors but why should the thing that is a huge moneysink be forcibly removed from the company that sustains it?

I am definitely in the top 1% of people that hate Google but I fear that anyone besides Google would be pruning videos from Youtube at an amazing clip.

As a monopolopy punishment, they should make any video that is available on YouTube and other platforms (Vimeo, etc) redirect to the other platform. Now, all of these other sites get an influx of users. We'll see who built the better infrastructure. sorry, my alarm clock is ringing, better wake up from the dreaming.

Of course it's not a monopoly or moneysink. It's highly profitable ($5b a year in revenue and not huge costs given their peering agreements).

TicTok, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, FB Video, Vimeo, Netflix etc all are counterexamples.