Nothing to SEE here (Pun intended). Except one, crucial thing.

A storm exploded on Reddit, and countless other places online, because YouTube anounced that on December 10th, 2019, they will update their terms of service with a new clause that they can terminate anyone they deem “not commercially viable”

No YouTube for you!

The text of the new clause would be:

“YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. “.

Speculation went wild on why, and how this would work in practice, and who would suffer from it. Here are some excerpts of those hypotheses, to give you a general idea:

“Google will block all your Google services”

• So YouTube has the protections of a public forum, but they can delete any channel or video they don’t like: “if we can’t make money off you, you’re outta here”
• Basically, bye bye all those channels who are demonetized
• [maybe this] is intended for users who because of their content are hitting YouTube’s ad revenue somehow. E.g. advertisers pulling out
• but it’s so general that it can mean they only keep users who either as creators of consumers bring them money
• So they can just ban your entire Google account (=Gmail, Google Drive…) just for using something as simple as an ad blocker. Potentially destroying your business or locking you out of incomplete schoolwork etc.
• Which news? Every website has some wording in their TOS saying as much
• Devil’s advocate: there’re a ton of YouTube channels out there that spam AI-generated videos… Perhaps this is a way to justify banning these type of channels.

These are the funniest comments

or, maybe, the most prophetic:

• “Is there a viable alternative yet? Pornhub, looking at you”.
• If Pornhub made a site like Vidhub, and then advertised it on Pornhub, they would win over night. Bonus points: They could advertise adult content to people verified to be 18+. That means they could have more advertisers than YouTube, and thus more money

And THIS is the best part

Several Reddit users looked terrified because:

• It made me realise just how dependant on google i am. Pretty much every digital thing I own is connected to my Google email and if i didnt have access to any google software I’d be f***ed.
• I always watch YouTube from my phone, but I use my Google account for all my homework…slides, docs, sheets, everything. I really hope it doesn’t affect me… This is scaring me and I’m worried.

That is, what I really, really hope everybody will learn from this.

Maybe all those worries and outrage on Reddit and elsewhere are just (quoting again from Reddit) “farcical assumptions”. It doesn’t matter one bit. If this serves to make enough people realize how much, and how stupidly, they enslaved themselves to ONE, apparently unreplaceable for-profit company, it will be the best “Don’t be evil” move ever from Google.