Because Google is a private company and allowed to delete videos whenever they like (assuming you don't have a contract where they've agreed to host them for you or anything like that).
IMO YouTube ought to be regulated the same way as broadcast media used to, with things like the equal-time rule, but that's not the rule as it currently stands.
The Equal Time rule was strictly for political candidates. Perhaps you're thinking of the Fairness Doctrine, which only made sense when broadcast media were very limited.
There's got to be a good way to get Google to stop censoring one side of the political spectrum, but if we have to resort to legislation or regulation, we're doing it wrong.
If we can't, then I guess Google really is too powerful.
Edit: Google is evil. But Google is also free. If we can't counter the first without eliminating the second, then we have failed as a society.
The Fairness Doctrine never made any sense. It only required that contrasting viewpoints be presented for an issue of public import.
You could satisfy it, by discussing, say, gun control, and presenting two contrasting viewpoints: One that all guns should be banned, and one that all guns, except for ones used by police and security guards should be banned. A distinction without much of a difference (That is well within the scope of very limited political orthodoxy) is a contrasting viewpoint.
How does competition deal with the network effects inherent to this type of service? I as a user don't want to watch my videos on a dozen different websites. I'll use the site with the videos that are most important to me and ignore the rest.
Whenever you use YouTube, you're already watching videos on dozens of different websites. YouTube is made up of thousands of servers, if not hundreds of thousands, spread all over the world. You just use a user interface that hides the difference from you. Similarly, whenever you use BitTorrent, the different pieces of your file come from dozens or hundreds of different machines, operated by different people, none of whom have the ability to take the file down.
Yes, so this is ultimately a UI problem. What we need is not a monolithic website to compete with YouTube, what we need is a decentralized, federated 'video site' protocol.
Really, what we need is the web back. That is, the web as I remember it in the 90s, before Google came along, when groups of people who shared similar interests would link to each other and form webrings. [1]
There's also PeerTube, which is a p2p YouTube clone using WebTorrents for distributing video, and which also utilizes the ActivityPub W3 recommendation for distributed federated social networking. [1]
How will you apply the equal time rule to political viewpoints?
To every political question, there are more answers then "A" or "B".
Are you going to give equal time to someone who wants to ban all guns, someone who wants to ban all guns in cities, someone who wants to ban all guns for people with criminal records, but not mental illnesses, someone who wants to ban all guns for people with mental illnesses, but not criminal records, someone who wants to ban guns for non-citizens, and someone who wants everyone to have a state-provided machine-gun? What about the other permutation of these viewpoints? Or are you just going to dump these questions into a 'left' and 'right' bucket, and say you're done, when the buckets weigh the same?
Relatedly: it's also much easier to come up with factually incorrect bullshit then it is to refute it. Any insights on how you want to deal with that problem?
IMO YouTube ought to be regulated the same way as broadcast media used to, with things like the equal-time rule, but that's not the rule as it currently stands.