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Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service (vice.com)
Louise Matsakis, writing for Motherboard: Google Docs, the collaborative, cloud-based word processing software, appears to be randomly flagging files for supposedly "violating" Google's Terms of Service. A member of Motherboard's team, as well as numerous users on Twitter, report that their documents are being locked for no apparent reason. Once a document is flagged, the owner of that document can no longer share it with other users. Users who have already been shared on a document that's been flagged are kicked out and can no longer access it. When a draft Motherboard article was locked on Monday morning, a message took over the screen that read "This item has been flagged as inappropriate and can no longer be shared." It's not clear why this is happening, but it may be the result of a glitch in the system Google uses to monitor Google Docs. DownDetector is currently reporting Google Drive problems in the US and Europe, which may be part of the problem.
I'm guessing his point in quoting all that is to show that, legally, when you upload your data to Google Drive, it's now *theirs*, and they can do what they want with it. If that means searching through it for stuff they don't like and then flagging it for violations, that's their right. If you don't like that, don't use it.
YouTube is a defacto monopoly at this point. It was set up to be a Commons where everybody could participate. It has no competitor of a similar scale.
So perhaps it should be broken away from Google and made a separate entity again. Google can still contract with them to sell ads on it.
Or maybe it should be made into a true Commons without a corporate overlord running it.