“YouTube is shutting down dissenting Biology PhDs and MDs”

Not as clownish as including an unnecessary “like”, a filler word for speech and therefore completely unnecessary in a written comment.

See what I did there? Its called an ad-hominem, an attack to the person instead of the argument. Thats what you did when you attacked Eric Weinstein instead of his argument.

On the one hand, you're pointing at these alternative video hosting sites' lack of engaged audience as the problem with switching over to them. On the other hand, you're saying YouTube needs to be forced to allow anyone and everyone to stay on the site — literally, to have a channel at all.

But you're making a very important hidden leap here: between people being allowed to have a channel on YouTube; and those channels being recommended by YouTube's algorithm.

Because it's the YouTube recommendation algorithm that determines whether you get an audience of millions. Without the algorithm, YouTube is just a video hosting platform with some not-very-good search-based discoverability, where you'd need to do your own off-platform SEO to get your videos seen.

Ignoring the discoverability you get through YouTube's algorithm, and assuming you only care about having a video at a URL you can link to from elsewhere, there's literally no benefit to using YouTube over one of those other video-hosts. They all give you a video at a URL.

In a world where YouTube was regulated as a utility, that would presumably involve the video-hosting infrastructure itself being content-neutral. But implicit to that would be a divorcing of the video-hosting component, from the discoverability component. YouTube the video host would be a utility, while YouTube the recommendation engine would be a separate company (not a utility), but only one of many able to run its own indexing and next-to-watch recommendations against the same store of content.

But again, that hidden leap. What's to say YouTube the recommendation engine, divorced from the video-hosting component, wouldn't still end up, through network effects, as the only site people care about? I would think it almost inevitable — especially starting from current conditions where everyone already knows about YouTube, and would still already know about YouTube (the index) after the split.

In such a world, the "public square" of video content — control over what video content most people happen to see by default — would still be controlled by the video-indexing company YouTube. Just like the "public square" of web content is controlled by the web-indexing company Google. Google never had to host the web, to end up with a degree of control over its public-visible curation.

In that world, does your demand for regulation still stand? If so, what does it mean? Would you demand the index itself to be regulated? Does that mean it would then be the government's job to define content moderation rules for YouTube's index? Would the government have to spend man-centuries or more on auditing for YouTube's approach to content moderation, to ensure they're following the rules as laid out? Or what?

This doesn't address all of your comment but specifically with patient confidentiality – Israel agreed to share more data with vaccine manufacturers in order to get quicker access to the vaccines. There are obviously problems with bilateral dealmaking and Israeli distribution (the article below points them out), but Israel almost certainly saved lives by weakening confidentiality. I think that was the right call.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/israel-trades-pfizer-va...

I don't get it, why would Merck leave money on the table. Merck has and will develop many more Covid drugs. It does not make sense to bet everything on one horse where there is a lot of uncertainty and risk that any drug will see the light of day.

I get that it makes sense as a narrative device to discredit Merck ("big pharma has acted against our interest in the past, so they are acting against our interest here"), but it does not make sense from Merck's point of view.

This is silly. You have alternatives, but you still are dismissing them. You could similarly say that if "McDonald mistreats me, where I'm going to go? Wendy? or Burger King? no one is going there"

Also your argument with electric company doesn't make sense, in this you could maybe compare it to an ISP, which I agree should be treated as an utility.

YouTube is just one of many services available. Your only argument about competitors is that not many creators are there, well, how do you think that will change? Are you expecting court to move some of YouTube users to Vimeo?