[asah]

no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT - if abused then any corporations will have to shut it down...

OTOH I'm 100.0% sure that google has a plan, been expecting this for years and in particular, has prior experience from free Gmail accounts being used for storage.

[justinclift]

> no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT ...

Hmmm, isn't the "free-ness" of YouTube because there were determined to outspend and outlast any potential competitors (ie supported by the Search business), in order to create a monopoly for then extracting $$$ from?

I'm kind of expecting the extracting part is only getting started. :(

[rapnie]

There is no "fundamental free-ness" for vids stored on YT. Videos are stored to serve the business plan of Youtube and under the rules Google sets for them, where they serve their advertisement and surveillance capitalism business.

Looking at the Wikipedia page for "Commons" [0] the first meaning of commons "accessible to all members of a society" is not really true, unless "on the whim of the YT platform". The second meaning of "natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit" is also not really true. There is no understanding that google will take any other than their own benefit into account. The third meaning of commons on that page is closest I guess to what is needed:

> Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

And that is certainly not what Youtube can be considered to be. Youtube videos are not in the commons, but kept on a proprietary platform where the proprietor is the sole decider what happens to its availability there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons