Hahahaha. Maybe I have a morbid sense of humour, but I find it funny that Google found ‘pay to play’ is ruining their business and then they go and shoot themselves in the foot by deleting their customers. Guess they ran out of books to burn.

What a way to kill the business—delete your customers! That would be like K-Mart examining the clothes that people wore into its stores and forbidding them to enter if their shirt was purchased from Wal-Mart. How much money did Google pay for YouTube? And they’re going to piss it all away by pissing off the people who use it? Is George Bush moonlighting as a Google executive?

As for WHY Google would do this, for those who don’t read the link, it might be a backdoor corporate ploy by CBS. That network is posting more of its stuff on YouTube, and is seeking to choke off alternate content. So what started as a peoples’ video service is now becoming corporatised. Big business corrupting something else. Censorship for monetary reasons. I don’t know how any of this is supposed to make anyone money to begin with, honestly.

I like to watch YouTube clips of John Stewart because it’s hard to receive him here. I’ll use YouTube less now because I’m not all that interested in video clips of funny-looking fat kids playing air guitar. Looks like YouTube had its 15 minutes of fame with the “macaca” clip, but now it’s going to be last year’s celebre. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it had to be stifled. Having a service where the world could see ANYTHING is threatening to the rulers…

As much fun as it is to view copy-righted material for free, you can’t really fault the owners of copy-rights for not wanting their property given away for free.  The only people who should be complaining are those who honestly believe they are somehow entitled to use or view others’ property without paying.  Those people would quickly change their tune if they were the ones losing money.

Permanently closing user accounts is a bit excessive - only because it is so pathetically simple for a person to create a new account using a new (free) email address.