YouTube Deserves Its Own Antitrust Scrutiny
This piece was originally published in RETURN by Blaze Media.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit P. Mehta wrote earlier this month in deciding the most consequential monopoly case so far this century. He was talking about Google’s illegal domination of online search — there’s a 9 out of 10 chance you use Google every time you search, and the judge agreed that Google gained that control of the market through bullying and secret deals with rivals. But he might as well have been talking about Google’s domination of online ads (where a separate antitrust trial is underway), online shopping, or any number of other areas of our digital lives.
One Google property that hasn’t gotten enough attention from regulators — and deserves a closer look — is YouTube, the global leader in online video. Every day more than 100 million Americans scroll through it, and in your own home it’s available on phones, computers, streaming boxes, gaming consoles, and likely even on your TV itself. How did YouTube get so big so fast? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be “by shoving competitors out of the way, and putting the squeeze on consumers,” just like in so many other areas where Google operates.
The Washington Post recently called YouTube “the most consequential technology in America,” because it’s now so much more than a phone app. It’s the world’s second-biggest search engine, after Google itself. More people use it to listen to music than Spotify or the radio. Its CEO says your living room is “YouTube’s next frontier,” and already more people watch it on TVs than any other streaming service. In seven years, its subscription TV service went from zero to the third-largest in America, after cable giants Charter and Comcast. It’s on track to be number one in subscription TV by 2026, and it thinks it might be able to double again before it tops out.
YouTube’s enormous ad business keeps 45 cents of every ad dollar spent, adding up to $31 billion in revenue last year. It serves up ads on the web, on its apps, on streaming services, and on the 110 million Google TV sets and devices. Don’t like ads? Join the 100 million subscribers who pay up to $22.99 a month for an ad-free experience. YouTube doesn’t mind; it makes money either way.
Being big isn’t illegal, but the way YouTube grew dominant might be: it muscled out every company that tried to be part of its ecosystem. It banned third-party ad software from the platform, and forced ad buyers to use their own. (“They crushed our growth and ruined our product,” says AppNexus’s former CEO Brian O’Kelley.) It copied Machinima’s creator-friendly and successful content network model, then pushed them off the platform. On the consumer side, YouTube has ceaselessly worked to kill ad blockers, and at the same time it’s raised subscription prices, made ad breaks longer, and expanded ads to more platforms — and now it’s testing ads you can’t skip.
YouTube’s now so big it has reportedly been willing to lose money in some markets while it waits for competitors to wither away. ("That’s kind of how monopolies roll," says O’Kelley.) It
leverages Google’s immense trove of data about how you use the internet, including data it collected without permission, to target ads better than any other company in the world. It’s moved into online shopping, taking on streaming video competitors like TikTok. And like Google itself, YouTube is leaning heavily into AI.
Worryingly, YouTube’s gotten so big that it doesn’t even take copyright, privacy, or child safety laws seriously. A million hours worth of YouTube videos have been used to train AI models — reportedly without creators’ permission and in violation of YouTube’s own rules . In 2019, U.S. regulators fined Google $170 million for YouTube children’s privacy violations. And even as YouTube viewership by kids and teens grows steeply, some children as young as 9 are being algorithmically served up hundreds of gun violence videos a month. The company reportedly says it deletes thousands of channels an hour for violating its rules, but it’s missing thousands more, and its clumsy approach is causing legitimate channels to be deleted, too.
Other countries are already moving in on YouTube. It’s been investigated by European Union antitrust regulators, and is accused in a new complaint of violating EU privacy laws. South Korean regulators have called it “monopolistic” and said they’d consider taking action. But our own regulators have never given YouTube the degree of scrutiny it deserves. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to use their market dominance to interfere with the free market, crush would-be competitors, and raise prices with impunity. But that seems to be exactly what Google is doing with YouTube, just as it has done in online search and online ads; it’s time for DOJ to give YouTube the same full investigative scrutiny it has appropriately applied to Google’s other monopolies.
