And any sharecropper was welcome to buy their own land, spin up their own castle, fund their own mercenary army, and make their own feudal kingdom! Sharecroppers weren't slaves either. But that's a pretty low bar (and "build your own YouTube" a pretty high bar).

I disagree that build your own YouTube is a “high” bar, outside of money.

There are and were multitudes of video hosting and serving websites. It is just ridiculously expensive.

Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.

>I disagree that build your own YouTube is a “high” bar, outside of money. (...) It is just ridiculously expensive.

I'm not sure what you mean. That it's not rocket science? Well, yes, it isn't. It's not the technology: money (and to a second extend, entrenchment and network effects, and ties with Android, and many other non-tech things) IS of course the huge, sky-high, bar, to building an alternative YouTube.

>Castles, mercenary armies, and conquering land are comparable much, much more difficult.*

Well, it was quite a lot of mobility in the feudal ranks. Any competent mercenary could rise to be a higher ranking soldier, and any compenent and cunning higher ranking soldier could, and often did, take on some existing feudal lords, and get their own smaller or bigger fiefdom. After some point, even succesful merchants could get their own armies and castles and be feudal "nobility". Tons of stories from the feudal times (that was what all of cross-feudal fighting was about), and thousands of castles and fiefdoms - and that's just in Europe.

Whereas Youtube? That's one service of its size/scale in the world, covering multiple billions of people.

That would be more like trying to get something competitive not to a feudal lord (which were a dime a dozen), but to the whole of an empire.

The digital sharecropper analogy is less about the monopoly position of platforms but about the content creator and platform relationship. More platforms wouldn’t change that relationship.

The platform owner can change the relationship, for example if it’s is publicly owned.

The point is is no one else in the world wants to make the enormous investment required to create a YouTube, so why should they get to make the rules?

It is not technically hard to make a YouTube alternative, just expensive.

Isn't buying your own farm easier then spinning up your own data center? I really don't understand the point you're trying to make.

For an individual, yes. For a country? It is just a matter of the country not wanting to spend the money to buy servers, bandwidth, and labor to moderate.

Why are countries coming up now? I thought you were arguing against the sharecropping analogy, and the people that do sharecropping are all low-power individuals.

"Someone rich could make a new ecosystem" is unrelated to whether the current ecosystem resembles sharecropping.

Because coldtea’s response involved using the power of a country’s legal system to force a business to share its revenue.

So, is your arguent that instead of inconveniencing those businesses, countries should just create competiting public services?

They can always do that too, but I'm also full for them inconveniencing those businesses.

Businesses should be whiped and forced to play responsibly in society. They can innovate on tech and features, they don't have to innovate on milking people and erroding working rights.

If an accusation of sharecropping is legitimate, I think it's fair for the government to apply regulation and not just try to compete.