Is YouTube Infrastructure? ⇥ bbc.co.uk

Thomas Germain, for BBC News, looked at the efforts of Ethan Zuckerman and others to study YouTube. Their findings are sometimes expected — most videos have been viewed fewer than 500 times — but often notable. Most videos are not edited, have no monetization, and have no requests for viewers to like, comment, and subscribe.

So, what is YouTube, anyway? A place for people like you and I to watch a relatively small number of headliners? Germain:

This narrative misses a critical piece of the picture, says Ryan McGrady, the senior researcher in Zuckerman’s lab, who participated in the scraping project. YouTube is a free service that was built from the ground up by a private company, and it could be argued that Google should be able to run the platform as such. But when you examine how people are actually using YouTube, it looks less like TV and more like infrastructure, McGrady says.

[…]

YouTube is one of the internet’s de facto repositories, the first place many of us go when we have videos we want to post or store online. It’s also a place where local authority meetings are broadcast, for example, providing a vital opportunity for public accountability in ways that weren’t possible before it existed. It isn’t just a “platform”, McGrady says, it’s a critical piece of infrastructure, and that’s how it should be regulated. “For companies that own so much of our public sphere, there are some minimum expectations we should have about transparency.”

I think it is generally a mistake to treat the popularity of corporations like these as a basis to treat them as infrastructure. They are at the very top of a deep stack. Fulfilling the law, the answer to this question should be “no, YouTube is not infrastructure”.

Even so, there is something appealing about this argument because video is special. It is cumbersome; it requires complex arrangements to serve it efficiently and reliably. But some of those barriers are becoming less foreboding, giving us more places to post and watch videos. It was not so long ago that YouTube was the only name in general-purpose video hosting. Yet you can now publish to most any social network. Instagram and TikTok host a different type of video but, for lots of people, they are just as relevant as YouTube. Alternatives like Rumble and X are appearing for the perpetually aggrieved set who are convinced their broadcasts would be censored elsewhere. Yet there is nothing else quite like YouTube.

I still believe it would be difficult and unwise to govern YouTube like it is infrastructure, even if it seems to have that role. And, so, the best thing we can do is to stop treating YouTube like infrastructure. It should not be the place to stream or archive government or board meetings. It should not be treated as a video host by other businesses. It is not a good destination for your important family video. It is a place to put those things to share them, if you would like, but it is not an archival choice. YouTube needs to have the ability to moderate videos because there are things expected of infrastructure but not appropriate for a general-purpose entertainment platform. As such, we need to stop seeing it as a video repository.

Update: As if to prove YouTube is still unique, Facebook says it is going to begin deleting old live broadcasts. For comparison, YouTube archives live videos indefinitely. It would be so great if there were alternatives not focused on boosting mindless reactionaries.