I feel there should be a legal principle that services as large as Google, that essentially have a monopoly in such a field could be legally ruled a service of public interest, and held to certain standards and essentially be told by governments how they be run.
How to escape this fate? Do not become a big monopoly.
We live in an age where various resources that are essentially indispensable public resources are provided by private, for-profit companies at their own whims and the law should recognize that.
Even non-profit services such as Wikipedia of course have the power to influence and steer the world to a degree that no non-democratically elected organization should have.
I'm going to need you to think very carefully about how much you trust the government to protect the public interest when it comes to dictating how a media platform operates.
The government is unlikely to be able to dictate algorithm changes, but reacting to and forcing favorable behaviors to the current regime to be preserved is certainly within their power.
There's a difference between ensuring competition and effectively nationalizing a company's business practices because they happen to be successful. Declaring Google search results a "public space" is the latter and leads us down a pretty obvious path as to what's actually going to happen with that.
If we wanted to encourage competition it would be an idea to start thinking more carefully about which bits of infrastructure should be in competition: i.e. stop letting social media companys buy out other social media companies (there's no reason Facebook should've been allowed to acquire WhatsApp given that they also had Messenger), and maybe require Google to run Chrome as an open-source project to prevent them vertically integrating the experience of "web browsing" under related technologies.
This can, and probably should include, public funding for alternative open-source products under the foundation model for different web technologies and vital services.
You need bigger systemic change for that. Under neoliberal capitalism the optimal theoretical end state of any (for profit) corporation is to own absolutely everything and be the last one standing. It‘s just the nature of a corporation.
Hyperbole, yes. But you get the point.
It just so happens that big tech firms have a shot of actually achieving it.
There are many ways to have inbound traffic visit your site.
If you are reliant on search terms, I can understand, but otherwise, Google does not have control over your domain name resolving to your server’s IP address.
I run a 4chan archive, fireden.net, I don't archive /b/ and my #1 reason I need to take down things is because of child porn, to the point that I honestly think about why i still run it anymore.
Yes, there are points in time when posters have attempted to post child pornography there, but it gets taken down swiftly and gets reported to moderators as swiftly as its posted.
Your "epicentre" of child pornography on the Internet is Facebook, not 4chan.[1]
8chan being dropped showed well how cancel culture works, and how in the court of public opinion one is found guilty not on evidence, but on sensationalist news articles that outright lie, sitting free from the pains of perjury and cross-examination.
I have not once in my life seen this child pornography or far-right content on 8chan that these news articles claimed infested it; one would have to be very lucky for the former to see it before a moderator removed it, and for the latter one would have to specifically browse niche boards that have very little activity compared to the big boards, which are simply about video games, lolcat image macros, and dating advice.
Have you ever seen child pornography on 8chan or 4chan? have you ever browsed them?
8chan had the infamous /loli/ , it was dedicated entirely to child pornography. The only rule was it had to be 3D rendered or drawn/painted as opposed to photographic/video.
So not child pornography by the legal definition of U.S.A. law and most other jurisdictions.
By your definition of child pornography, i.r.c., and Mangadex also feature child pornography, as well as Google search results and most mainstream pornography websites.
Your comment for some reason reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Personal websites were a given there was a major urge to have your own website. Whether you had your own domain name or a Geocities type of page you just had to have one.
On dialup people tended to be more independent you jumped on the Internet then jumped off to preserve your precious 60 hours/month (and to allow your landline phone to get calls). That time offline was used learning about things and you couldn't Google every little thing.
I was much more into the fundamentals of the computer itself more than the stuff you could see on it. Making boot disks, adjusting settings in Windows, discovering Linux, learning HTML, sending lots of email, some IRC. The Internet grew in complexity and usefulness, and always on cable got cheaper but early on the computer itself was my main focus.
Now it seems as if a computer is simply a conduit to watch YouTube videos. It seems like people are realizing they need to be more independent.
The first video I tried to download was the first South Park Short on dialup. It took around 6 or 8 hours. This was in 1997/98. The next year I got cable and it was super fast like a couple of minutes.
Technically you do own the domain, although the registry and most registrars retain the right to revoke it based on their abuse policies; There are enterprise-grade registrars that have contracts without these provisions (like CSC Global[0], which Disney uses[1]) if you'd like to remove this risk.
It's impossible to be completely impervious to all threats, but for your domain name there are some options that may help. For instance there are domains sold outside the reach of specific jurisdictions[1] and there are blockchain dns efforts as well[2].
Tell that to the people who have be completely de-platformed over the last few years.
Everyone agrees that most, if not all, of them are horrible people, but it is totally possible to lose your domain name if no one will provide registrations and such services to you.
This isn't just about a personal website though. This is Linus Tech Tips (with a staff of about 20 people) building his own platform for delivering content as the article points out.
That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment.
Linus Media Group has 32 employees [1] with 7 massive YouTube channels.
As the article pointed out they also have other tech YouTubers releasing content of Floatplane, not just their own channels.
