Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
You can see how hard they optimized by watching a very old video you uploaded yourself.
Exanple of mine:
I uploaded 3 videos some time (2x 9 years and 1x 6 years) ago with about 1min of runtime each.
They do not get clicked much.
Timing it, it took Google about 3 seconds to view it the best available resolution.
Only 3 seconds is insane if one remembers how long a drive needs to just spin up from standby. And that is not even with a cached video.
Now I wanna see how long it would take a competitor to achieve the same performance.
I remember some time ago when YT took about 10-15sec to do the same task. They heavily improved their performance. Even for low performance content.
Sad that some are so entitled.