Saturday, December 7, 2019

My COPPA Letter

"Please focus enforcement on YouTube and other large corporations and not on the individual creators. By all means truly bad actors should be pursued, but there is so much content that attracts a mixed audience that the benefit of the doubt should given to creators. This is further amplified by YouTube's internal filtering that makes serving adult audiences  much more difficult. YouTube channels that focus on adult interests have to use language and tools that are "family friendly" if they want their viewership to survive. This makes most of the content attractive to adults, teens and children.

Also, a large concern I have is the standards this ruling is setting for a post-monopoly online video world. Should YouTube's internet video dominance be toppled or broken up, smaller video platforms serving more diverse viewerships may emerge. While Alphabet/YouTube has the infrastructure and funding to enact deep changes, a more leveled market will have smaller platforms that may not. With Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service (See Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services) this can affect the safety and security of tenants on such platforms if the rentiers are required to police them. Without access to these services, online video hosting may be prohibitively expensive, chilling speech, silencing minorities and marginalized populations and reinforcing large corporation market control and gatekeeping.

Online speech is the printing press of the early 21st century. It is a democratizing force that puts power in the hands of the people. Online video has lowered the barrier to entry and created a wealth of content and information free at the point of access for everyone. Protecting children from predatory advertising is important, I wish you well in your enforcement of that. Please don't chill the speech of many to stop the wrongs of a few."

You can leave a comment on the YouTube COPPA situation as well, before December 9th 2019.

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