Okay, just to play devil's advocate… Is YouTube a public domain that falls under the First Amendment or is it a private corporation that has the right to decide its course of business? I know that I was outraged over the *ahem* lawsuit that forced a fundamentalist Christian baker to provide a wedding cake for a homosexual couple. Wouldn't that make me just a wee bit hypocritical if I were to condemn YouTube for deciding that certain videos are not within their corporate policy?
There is a company that leases the small bit of our farm ground next to a state highway for a billboard. Part of that lease stipulates there will be no advertising for alcoholic beverages, certain "adult" establishments and establishments that provide abortion services. Is that really any different on the small scale to YouTube restricting content on the large-scale? As I told the company that leased the square of brown for the billboard there is almost 15 miles of state highway between the interstate and the next highway and they were free to contact any of those landowners. During the bakery suit, it was pointed out that the gay couple had many other bakeries to choose from. Perhaps, we should just allow YouTube to provide a niche for another marketer. Who knows, if the new market catches on that company could deny the original a significant amount of income and very possibly make changing their minds the financial benefit. If the new market has enough imagination and innovation, it might even become the new place to go rather than YouTube and a political decision become their financial downfall. Perhaps it's time for us to stop complaining about political statements and make them akin to fishing with dynamite. And as an ancient redneck told me once… The largest danger of fishing with dynamite is the possibility of capsizing your own boat if you don't watch what you are doing.
Imagine, however, that there was only one property owner and no recourse to others, then the restrictions would not appear so friendly. Look up the kindly company store and mining communities sometime.
Most national marketplaces are not easy to enter, especially if it requires a very large amount of capital to enter. In the case of Y-tube, from what I have seen, it does not really make much if any profit as a stand alone product, it is designed to take your information in watching habits, etc. and sell that to advertisers via as is g-mail where they mine your emails for information, and their smart phone/tablets where they sell your location, and so forth. Gxxgle makes so much money on advertising derived from selling your personal data to companies that it supports the googleplex of other services at a loss that serve to feed your information to them.
Even other wealthy companies are reluctant to create competitors as spinning up the expensive infrastructure necessary for video streaming without someway of monetizing "free" services via something similar to gxxgle's adsense service. Since gxxgle was first to do this, a company challenging them on those grounds might not make a profit for years which most public companies cannot do relative to investing money where no such challenge exists. Eventually most monopolies fail in the long run but that can take a very long time. During that time, monopolies (or oligopolies as well) settle in on milking the herd and buying political and media influence to protect their racket for as long as possible.
Monopolies can be regulated by the state as a matter of long settled law--e.g. public utilities cannot refuse you service because of your beliefs or legal practices for obvious reasons. Note, that you could for example generate your own electricity, however should you be forced to do so at great cost because the people in the electric company do not like you. Similarly, as a property owner, your power to lease is restricted by public laws banning discrimination in leasing by race, gender, and other criteria as defined by law.
No one can force you do business but if you engage in it, the the long settled practice has been if you engage in commercial transactions on a regular basis with strangers--the state can indeed set the limits of how you conduct your business and how you treat your employees. You cannot go from general principles of laissez faire and apply them to today's legally restricted market place--the truth that any small business owner will tell you is that they are bound up with all kinds of local, state, and federal regulations including even signage on public roads. Youtube wants to be a tyrant in determining what content may be shown via a service that is used by many people, then they can be regulated through the political process just as your local grocery store can be.
When gxxgle ruled via a better search engine than competitors, producing new services or buying them as in you tube, and so forth, and ruling content with a light hand, then one could make the argument that regulating them would be more harmful than good. A similar argument was made in the day for ATT which for awhile improved the phone industry in the early years in creating a national system.
However, if ATT got into regulating the content of your phone calls, deciding that some people and products were "bad" on their own and refusing telephone numbers to businesses and individuals that displeased them, refusing to allow people to roll out new services that competed with ATT, and so forth, would you accept that?
There is a reason that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed along with the Clayton Act and that the FCC has the power to limit broadcast monopolies and media concentration. In the long run, monopolies are rarely beneficial to the public.
