A good move.
Everything so big as YouTube should follow national laws.
Otherwise private terms of policies become more part of society than national ones. Then the hundreds of years of fighting becomes nothing and we are back in a modern kingdom based society.
What does "national law" mean for a global platform though? Does Youtube only have to restore the video in Germany and still block it everywhere else?
I don't even understand why Youtube should be forced by a country to host someone's content. I can understand the opposite (being forced by the government to take down content in their jurisdiction, that has been done before), but forcing a site to keep a video feels really strange to me.
> I don't even understand why Youtube should be forced by a country to host someone's content.
It doesn't appear to be settled even in U.S. law whether requiring a company to host something would be governmental overreach. The traditional "common carrier" doctrine is pretty broad. It's not an exact analogy for the kind of regulation some people would like governments to undertake regarding YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc., but it's not totally unrelated either.
Eugene Volokh from UCLA's law school recently posted a 79-page draft article on the legalities of regulating social media companies as common carriers under U.S. federal law: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/carrier.pdf. One large section, II.A., "The General Constitutionality of Compelled Hosting" (pp. 35-58), argues that compelled hosting isn't in general prohibited by the U.S. federal constitution, so in his view the U.S. Congress could pass a common-carrier-style law mandating such companies host content on a neutral basis, if they wanted to (at least if the law avoids various issues he identifies).
youtube is effectively operating a bridge, or rather the majority of bridges in germany. it pays for maintenance but gets to charge a toll and keep the profits. however, in order to use this privilege, it does not get to decide who should be allowed to cross
Companies themselves are authoritarian organizations that enact international policies for the purpose of extracting wealth from a local population. Countries that have skin in the game for their own geography are the least of your worries, they are optimizing locally. Meddlers without skin in the game are more problematic.
When did youtube , or any big tech not comply with local laws in authoritarian countries? Never, their position is not one of activism it's "I'm OK with that"
They already do, and Google complies with those laws. See China. It is quite telling that Google seems to put more effort into complying with the CCP than German law, however.
Is that really what we want. Most language is allowed under US law (which is a good thing imo), but does YouTube really need to allow hate speech, brigading, or astroturfing?
Clearly the line is not 'all speech that is allowed in the US'?
the question is not which kind of speech do we want to allow, but who gets to decide that. we don't want government to decide that because its decision is absolute and leaves no room for escape, hence the laws for free speech, but the german court effectively argues that on a platform as dominant as youtube, censorship has the same impact as government censorship and should therefore be treated the same.
Why should YouTube allowed to dictate what hate speech means?
From the country I am in, the party that must not be named is notorious in making hate speeches, and the videos are widely available on YouTube.
YouTube is a private entity that positioned itself as a huge repository of public opinions and videos, it must not decide arbitrarily based on a stupid algorithm what is correct. They must be regulated.
