1y ago

I think the UN, or some international agency, should provide an alternative to youtube and similar social media

So, hear me out: I've read in many posts, articles, opinion pieces, etc how Youtube will be impossible to replace because of the sheer amount of data it stores. Any youtube replacement would need huge data centers and therefore a tremendous amount of money to keep everything running smoothly in terms of hardware, staff, etc.

Seeing as in recent discussions about human rights, and specifically third-generation human rights, the right to economic and social development, and the right to education and communication are mentioned, it makes sense to consider not only access to the Internet, but to platforms that store valuable data, like videos, as rights that should be guaranteed by international organizations.

So would it be too crazy to think that it should be an international human rights organization the one that steps up and provides an alternative to youtube? Securing the hardware, the human resources, and the capital to launch a non-profit, privacy-friendly platform?

6 comments

@DollTowJet-ski@kbin.social Or each organization can just set up its own Peertube instance and federate.
- I don't know much about the technical aspect of Peertube. I have an idea of the concept behind it. But if it's anything like torrents and seeding, then as soon as an instance is, for some reason, off-line, content will suffer. Maybe I'm missing some ingenious design in the peertube infrastructure, but I don't see how it could replace Youtube.

And now think about, who might be willing to spend such a huge amount of money to create and maintain a platform that is capable of steering the public information sphere like hardly anything else?
Saudi Arabia, Russa, China, Koch brothers, etc.
Will the, say, french tax payer be willing to pay for Youtube? And a Youtube that looks awfully government controlled.
- Well, I know I'm just day-dreaming, but in my dream, the institution just puts the money, and makes the organization itself completely independent of those who finance it. And if all countries/citizens of the world, or at least of most of the world (Western countries, for example) back it up, then it would be hard for one country to try to influence the service for their own agenda. I mean, right now all citizens of the countries that belong to the UN contribute to the UN through their taxes. The UN has some wild expenses I am sure virtually no citizen of these countries supports. I don't think it would be too wild to imagine people supporting the fact that a very small percentage of their taxes could go to something everyone uses.
  
  If they funded it they would control it, that's all they do. The UN is not an organization you want in charge of anything you need to be free. Or to work.
  First of all what we need is an internet bill of rights.
  The governments could then conceivably be involved in creating and maintaining infrastructure for the internet as if it were a utility.
  Storage pools could be a part of that,maybe some day.
  But to willingly give the UN or any unelected global bureaucracy control over something like that gives me the heebie jeebies.

6 comments