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It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

economist.com

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Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#181

Post by vidarh »

runako wrote: post #50
vidarh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The services may not work a la carte They don't need to. Prime could still offer Prime Video / Music as a membership perk. But if the media services are independent, maybe it'd turn out offering one or more of the others, or letting customer pick and choose, would end up making more financial sense (FireTV can already be used to subscribe to competing services in addition ) I'm not saying it's necessarily a good id…

This misses the point. A breakup would put Prime Video / Music (are those two even allowed to be in the same company? Why? Who decides?) on the same footing as Hulu or Spotify. This would create independent third-tier players in both markets. The consumer would likely end up paying more (because Prime Video / Music can't be run at zero or negative margins as part of a bundle; ditto for other media options like Spotif…

Splitting it out as a separate service would not inherently stop Amazon from paying exactly the same amount towards Prime Video as it does today, and would allow the new company to seek additional customers unwilling to pay for the full bundle, so it's not at all a given that prices wouldn't go down.

But even assuming that'd not be the case, anti-trust law is in large part aimed at ensuring competitors have fair access to the markets, not minimising costs to consumers. It's presumed that over time the former will ensure the latter and/or improve service, but it's really a separate issue.

That said, I don't see a compelling anti-trust case for going after Prime Video anyway - there's plenty of competition in that space.

However, there is also another possible cost reduction in forcing unbundling as well for those customers who don't want Prime Video, but want the other benefits. Not at all convinced it'd be worth it. That's not the part of Amazon that's a competitive issue.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#182

Post by jeffwask »

echelon wrote: post #173
EForEndeavour wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "in a good way"? How do you control whether someone using your video workflow automation uses it for good (whatever that is) or not?

How does Adobe assure this? Or any tool maker? Email has problems, yet the good and productive uses vastly outweigh the bad actors. The vast majority of systems humans use have benefit, otherwise they would be unwound by governments (eg. crypto). People want to be creative more than they want to be destructive. The destroyers will be moderated, just as they are in every system. I want a world where every kid can make…

> I want a world where every kid can make their own Star Wars or Princess Mononoke and create more than Scorsese's entire career within a single year.

Rad goal. Good luck as someone who consumes more YouTube than mainstream content. I'm all for unlocking the potential of creators.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#183

Post by ahtihn »

pier25 wrote: post #54
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cue uBlock origin - I don’t recall the last time I watched an injected ad on YouTube. Of course most content these days is peddling some product, or has a quick word from sponsors - but at least I don’t have to put up with unrelated ads in the middle of a stream.

And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. I pay for YouTube Premium. Creators get paid and I don't watch ads. We have a family plan so this applies to the whole family. We spend way more time watching YouTube than Netflix but pay for both.

I don't really care that creators don't get paid. Youtube was better when no one was getting paid.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#185

Post by heisenbit »

nindalf wrote: post #115

I respect the Economist’s business columnist (Schumpeter) and tech columnist (Babbage) but this seems to be a case of Schumpeter writing about tech. Leaving aside HN loving the idea of Big Tech being weakened by becoming Relatively Small Tech, I don’t see how this is in Alphabet’s or YouTube’s interest. The article assumes that such a divorce would be simple and it would allow YouTube to focus on taking on TikTok. It…

> They would need to fork it and staff all of these teams

I think the worst would be having to split the customer base. Their sales costs would increase a lot and they would loose pricing power. On the social networking front turn a leader into a me-too. This article confuses what these businesses seem on the surface (search+video) and what they really are (selling ads, keeping track of customer identities to do the same).

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#186

Post by JohnFen »

judge2020 wrote: post #95
fisf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

No, they're making the case for them being a monopoly. Unless Google is preventing others from purchasing compute or hard drives by buying up all of the supply, they are not performing any anti-competitive actions, which would not make them liable under any anti-trust statutes. I don't think anyone's in doubt YT is a monopoly with how big and widely-used it is. It's just that they continue to survive because of how w…

Right.

And we shouldn't forget that, in the US anyway, it's not illegal to be a monopoly. The "antitrust" laws are about unfairly leveraging your monopoly position.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#187

Post by smm11 »

dageshi wrote: post #147
nindalf wrote: post #115

I respect the Economist’s business columnist (Schumpeter) and tech columnist (Babbage) but this seems to be a case of Schumpeter writing about tech. Leaving aside HN loving the idea of Big Tech being weakened by becoming Relatively Small Tech, I don’t see how this is in Alphabet’s or YouTube’s interest. The article assumes that such a divorce would be simple and it would allow YouTube to focus on taking on TikTok. It…

I think more fundamentally, youtube is far less vulnerable to the chatgpt garbagisation of the web. SEO crap is already bad, it will likely get much worse. Youtube has actual good content from creators whose opinions I trust. Google would be moronic to give that up, they've spent long enough building it.

The internet as we know it is already there, AI talking to AI. The luddites who want the mid-90s environment back were right.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#188

Post by JohnFen »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #80
kevincox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

> It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a bad thing, they are making use of an otherwise wasted resource, effectively lowering the cost for products that need daytime capacity to serve humans. Google could rent this compute capacity to the masses, allowing for healthier competition.

> Google could rent this compute capacity to the masses, allowing for healthier competition.

They could, but no major corporation wants healthier competition. They want no competition whatsoever. So there is no reason at all for Google to do this, and every reason (from their point of view) not to.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#189

Post by Retric »

scarface_74 wrote: post #178
Retric wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s not a question of money but of resources. If Google offers up their compute at market rates and YouTube is treated as any other customer on that compute then it’s not a problem. Microsoft for example could have spent unlimited money on IE and the justice department wouldn’t have cared as long as it was treated as a business investment. However, leveraging the ability to change windows was seen as problematic…

Actually, you're kind of making my point. Absolutely nothing came of the DOJ case with regards to IE bundling. But that still isn't logical. Are you really going to say that a company shouldn't be allowed to use resources to create a new product? Should it have been illegal for Netflix to use profits from shipping DVDs to later bundle video streaming? Should it also be illegal for companies to "subsidize" open source…

Microsoft lost. They avoided being broken up, but it’s absolutely clear they had broken the law. It’s not IE bundling alone that was at issue but Microsoft making it harder to install competitors and limiting access to some API’s to IE. They where legally required to change this and did in fact do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

And the critical thing you don’t seem to understand is resources aren’t the same thing as money. Suppose Intel decided to change their CPU design so only their compiler would have access to the full instruction set, that’s not something money can buy. Anyone can bring lots of money to the table, only the monopoly can leverage the resources associated with that monopoly.

As to spending money, again it’s not about gaining a foothold because anyone can spend money. The issue is if someone is subsidizing a business to maintain their monopoly rather than operate a profitable business. Google didn’t get into fiber because they wanted to operate a profitable business they got into fiber to defend their websites. They didn’t cross the line, but you can see how long term subsidies of different business could be seen as desirable/problematic.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#190

Post by JohnFen »

osigurdson wrote: post #14

For me, YouTube is the most effective ad sponsored service by far. Users are forced to watch at least 5 seconds of ads before watching any content. This 5 second window is very focused as there is no time to context switch to anything else. Contrast this with Google search - sure there are some ads at the top but these are easy to mentally filter out.

> Users are forced to watch at least 5 seconds of ads before watching any content.

Not all users. I pay Google in order to not have to watch those ads, and they aren't served to me.

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