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Unofficial Answers: Why Does YouTube Seem So Biased? (vortex.com)
Lauren Weinstein writes with some insight on an frustrating aspect of YouTube's video hosting service: "Why does Google's YouTube seem so biased against ordinary users who upload videos? I've unfairly had my videos blocked, received copyright strikes for my own materials, and even had my account suspended — and it's impossible to reach anyone at YouTube to complain!" No, YouTube isn't biased against you — not voluntarily, anyway. But it could definitely be argued that the copyright legal landscape — particularly in the mainstream entertainment industry — is indeed biased against the "little guys," and Google's YouTube must obey the laws as written. What's more, YouTube exists at the "bleeding edge" of the intersection of technology and law, where there's oh so much that goes bump in the night ...
A lot of it boils down to the rise of heavily asymmetric connectivity combined with "no servers" clauses in many ISP contracts.
That kind of killed the whole distributed nature of things...
Oh yeah, guess who are involved heavily in the last-mile service market? Cable companies.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No, it really wasn't. I was there. The internet was a smattering of academic, government, and large corporate sites which was generally only useful to other in similar fields, and certainly nothing which your average person could find or use. In fact, it was actually a rather exclusive club.
Do you know what it has now? Github. Stack Overflow. Wikipedia. Online API documentation, programmimg tutorials and example of nearly *everything*. Help forums for both end users and experts alike. Streaming audio and video. MMOs. Downloadable videogames. Awesome stuff that I use every day, both professionally and for entertainment purposes. Okay, it has Facebook, Comcast, and cyber-criminals as well, but you take the bad with the good.
Sorry, but this mythical "golden age of the Internet" was never there. It was really only even *close* to being true if you happened to be a university employee or student (grad student or higher) with direct access to the net through the major university backbones, and even then it was really only a promise of things to come. While I'm sure it was awesome having the internet more or less as a personal playground, I'll take the internet today, warts and all, a thousand times over.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.