Manthan

As a loyal Google user and admirer, this blog post by Mark Cuban makes me a cringe. Writing about the details of Google-Youtube deal, Mark Cuban quotes some anonymous sources

> The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look
> the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement
> continues to flourish.
> The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow
> them down and lock in Youtube’s position. As Google looked at it they
> bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement.
> Universal obliged and sued two capable Youtube clones Bolt and
> Grouper. This has several effects. First, it puts enormous pressure on
> all the other video sites to clamp down on the laissez-faire content
> posting that is prevalent. If Google is agreeing to remove
> unauthorized content they want the rest of the industry doing the same
> thing. Secondly it shuts off the flow of venture capital investments
> into video firms. Without capital these firms can’t build the data
> centers and pay for the bandwidth required for these upside down
> businesses.

For me Google is still an upstart with a better product. Takes the market because of a superior product and by putting users ahead of anything else. Stifling competition, getting competitive advantage by evil means ? That’s not the Google I admire and its not in Google’s character to do something like this. I would need more than “unidentified sources” to be really convinced.

I liked the way Rollingstone put it, “The First YouTube Election“. Republican Senator George Allen’s racist comments found its way upto youtube. Then it got picked up by major news networks like CNN. Public figures have to get used to this new media, a world where they are constantly under observation and any small mistake or off hand comment can get magnified into something potentially career damning.

There’’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.

If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen’’s monkeyboy dig.

CNN, BBC and others have realised the potential of so called “citizen’s media” with the introduction of features like “iReport” by CNN. CNN encourages its viewers/readers to send across photos/video’s to put across their stories. A lot of these videos are then shown in primetime shows like Paula Zahn now and others. The flow of news now in lot of these instances is reversed, from people to the blogsphere and then to news networks.