Is YouTube Going Away?

I'm watching the situation carefully. The head of the FTC has shown his tyrannical, predatory motivations by calling the crackdowns "like shooting fish in a barrel and the creators are the fish". While YouTube has plenty of blame in all of this, we shouldn't ignore the dangers of government overreach and unchecked power. Not to get political about it but it's part of the equation here.

Fining individual creators $42k per video isn't punitive; it's financial murder.

I'm giving serious consideration to making all of my YouTube videos private toward the end of the year just to be on the safe side. If the worst case scenario comes to pass, I'll permanently delete my channel.

Yeah they got way too greedy and didn't put up safeguards to prevent collecting kids' cookies. You'd think a company that big would have decent lawyers and know how to keep themselves from getting in trouble but I guess that data was too valuable to advertisers.

Pushing channels is stupid, straight up, but I doubt the FTC is really going to go after your commonplace youtuber just making videos for a general audience. Could be wrong and the FTC might be out for blood. It'd be political suicide if they pulled that s*** though. They start fining innocent people and there's going to be an uproar.

I thought that things were on track but after today, all bets are off.

The demise of YouTube still look inevitable from how things stand right now but I wouldn't be too confident at this point. It might pull through.

I still think YouTube isn't sustainable long term. Under pressure from many sides, they, like many social media sites, have changed their terms of service so many times to ban different things (and arbitrarily enforced them) that users are losing confidence in them as a platform.

We'll have to see how COPPA is ultimately enforced in the coming months. Only after that will there be a clear enough picture.

COPPA as it applies to YouTube looks bad at first. They did clarify some things about the rules - maybe there's going to be a better definition of "made for kids" when it comes to that.

There might not be so much of a reason to panic on COPPA.