YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform

I think many (maybe even a majority of?) Americans consider individual freedom to be a deontological moral good. This includes freedoms of those running private businesses. The "Protected Class" rules were created because many (including some overlap with the first set of) Americans didn't like specific consequences of enforcing that moral good.

Policy in a well-functioning, pluralistic, society will necessarily have (occasionally self-contradictory) compromises because we are trying to satisfy groups of people with sometimes conflicting needs and values.

> Network effects mean that most internet platforms form natural monopolies

I don’t think these monopolies are nearly as natural as something like transportation on rail infrastructure.

I think there’s a ton of regulation that can and should be applied to these companies that would bite away at how “natural” these monopolies appear (though, some of these require new legislation, for sure, which might be impossible given Congress in the modern area).

We could regulate interoperability, and force major media organizations to provide interpretation to their competitors (similar to how MVNO’s are allowed to buy their backend infra from the major players at or near cost).

We could prevent these “natural monopolies” from being embedded in a larger organization. YouTube’s monopoly might not appear nearly so natural if it was forced to be separated from the rest of Google and stand on its own.

Facebook’s monopoly would not be so natural if it had been prevented from buying every apparent threat to its business in the last decade. If you split up Facebook into its data collection systems, Facebook itself, the ad sales business, Instagram, and WhatsApp, suddenly it’s monopolies aren’t so natural.

Hell, the standard VC playbook of the 2010s was essentially the definition of anti-competitive practices: ignore the costs, ignore the revenues, just lose money on the business in an attempt to dominate the market to a degree that you can raise costs on consumers and no one will be able to stop you. That was the exact VC playbook, and also almost a perfect description of monopolistic behavior and anti-competitive practices.

I don’t think these are natural monopolies at all. I think Congress and regulators were both asleep at the switch for decades while these monopolies slowly formed out of pretty standard anti-competitive practices.

Tear down their walled gardens, separate these behemoths into their actual distinct lines of business, and prevent them from buying every competitor they see and they won’t be so unassailable.

I too loved the Boosh growing up, and I would still laugh at most of it today. So far it’s managed to avoid the retroactive judgement that other shows have. Why that is I don’t know - is it because it was cult and niche, is it because those who know about it love the comedians and want to keep quiet, is it because they haven’t fallen foul of the power figures in the MSM? Off the top of my head, there’s blackface and the transgender Old Gregg sex predator that I’m surprised haven’t been called out much yet.

On some level there’s nothing wrong with the “I go by many names” bit - the blackface wasn’t really necessary other than the character was meant to be some kind of psychedelic guitarist and the most recognisable psychedelic guitarist was Hendrix. There wasn’t anything that was mocking black people, and there wasn’t really any stealing of a black person’s job because the whole humour of the Boosh was Noel, Julian and Rich playing all these different characters by themselves. It was like going to watch an improv group perform but on TV and with costumes.

I think a line needs to be drawn and each sketch of these comedy shows interpreted through a lens of intent. Is the underlying minority the butt of the joke or is it the character that is being mocked? If it’s the first, by all means denigrate it but if not it should be allowed to be made. There was a lot of uproar over the South Park transgender episode where a lot of people missed the point that South Park wasn’t mocking transgender people, it was mocking self interested characters like Cartman who will manipulate anything for their own advantage, such as pretending to be transgender so they can use the female bathroom. Unfortunately, I think Old Gregg probably falls into the other camp, as unless I’m missing something (and it’s been a while since I’ve watched it so I might be wrong), the “joke” seems to be that Old Gregg is a lonely transgender outcast that is flashing her “mangina” and trying to coerce people into sex.

All these culture war lines are both very ill defined and selectively enforced, which does nothing other than throw fuel on the fire that they are just tools that the MSM can use to retroactively cancel people that no longer serve them or are actively going against them. If there really isn’t this targeted agenda, the companies like YouTube either need to write clear guidelines and enforce them fully not just selectively, or alternatively drop the moral arbiter stance and instead take that of a museum or public library that exists solely as a container for artworks and lets the public be the judge. Anything else is hypocritical at best and malevolent public opinion manipulation at worst. Personally, I think they should take the public container route, because as soon as you start having an authority that is in charge of defining the culture, you’re on a very slippery slope that leads to authoritarianism. Taking down videos from platforms is the modern equivalent to book burning.

The main stream media loves to pretend it’s the hero and that it created the MeToo movement but it didn’t - the MeToo movement was created organically bottom up by women on Twitter. All the mainstream media did was capitalise on it after the fact to get clicks and eyeballs.

I'm just speculating from the "no such thing as bad press" dept.

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