Wow, it's chilling how easy it is to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers. The commentary is focused on the 480p playback... that's a red herring, one that I didn't even notice. The true crime here is that this policy successfully buries "what consumers don't like" in a sea of collusion. Let me explain. Five years from now, after this collusion has permeated all of the mobile carriers, let's say I decide that I can create the next YouTube competitor. I have some great ideas for how to create something that content creators and consumers will like a lot better than what YouTube is today. Pulling that off will be hard, I'll have to get enough capital together to create the infrastructure, I'll have to convince loads of content creators AND consumers to come to my currently empty service, and I'll have to deal with all of the overhead that goes with starting a business in today's DMCA'd world. Pretty tall order. Oh, oops, also, now that Net Neutrality no longer exists, I also have to somehow convince the other GATEKEEPERS (TMobile, AT&T, Verizon) to let me compete on the same footing as YouTube, for, YouTube gets free mobile bandwidth. I do not. This puts me, and any other small-scale competitors at a catastrophic disadvantage. Sure, I might succeed, but I'll have to beat a cartel. Sure, that happens sometimes, but not as often as it fails. And because of that, once YouTube and Netflix and HBO get into the cartel, they serve the cartel, not you. You are just one of their assets at that point. You certainly aren't going to any other service provider, so you can watch their content, or nothing. And largely, you'll like it because your lack of imagination that prevented you from seeing this coming also prevents you from seeing the next phase in your loss of rights. You were really only going to watch cat videos all day, and when the cartel has full control, the cat videos will keep coming. However, once the cartel is the single source for user-generated videos (they are the single source because any other source requires use of your data plan, which, now that everything you 'care' about is free, can be shrunken to nothing), totalitarian governments will have a very convenient, clearly defined path to take when they want to silence unpopular speech. Damning video that disproves our claims that minorities are not subject to police brutality? No matter, make YouTube take it down. We don't even need to threaten to rescind their cartel status, they know it will happen. And this absolutely will happen. It already happens in the third world today. Many countries in today's third world used to be pinnacles of free thought and human advancement. Allowing democratic free speech to be buried under the weight of oligopolies is, in my view, the first nail in the coffin of first-world brilliance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
