YouTube, I Tube, He, She, or It Tubes.....

Apparently YouTube has been removing videos and closing accounts based on political content (see for example here and here). While YouTube is a terrific service in many ways, I have been concerned for a long time that it is becoming too much the dominant source for video on the internet -- ever notice how many videos on sundry websites are embedded YouTube videos these days? A near-monopoly means power, and power will be abused.

While it's obviously right and proper to raise pluperfect hell about this and try to get YouTube to change its ways, I can't help but think that the real answer to this problem is decentralization. That's the genius of the internet, after all. The focus should be on getting video onto the internet in formats that don't depend on YouTube or on any centralized source. Rather than have a single entity which controls most video on the internet and then fighting to influence that entity's policies, it would be better to have a situation where there is no such gatekeeper at all.