On the Google Plantation, Youtube is the one eyed bully in the land of the blind slave creators…
Youtube has responded to the demand to come to the table and assured the IG Metall Union that they will meet the deadline, however in response to Forbes, Youtube has obliquely indicated they are not about to change…
#SpeakersUnicorner There have been protests outside Google’s European headquarters in Dublin over the last six weeks after Google summarily deleted a well known Irish Journalists Youtube channel without explanation.
There has been a uprising growing in Europe about Google / Youtube’s unilateral illegal, uncooperative and anti trust practices and activities, as well as demonetisation and lack of transparency, and now one of the world’s biggest Unions has taken on the Youtube / Google Behemoth.
With its unique antitrust and GPDR rules, Europe is about to become very toxic for Youtube / Google’s supremacist monopolistic business model.
This issue has slowly been creeping up media coverage and attention and will soon trend meaning mainstream media, who are complicit in the Establishment hegemony by supporting Google / Youtube won’t be able to hide it much longer. Already Vice, Vox and even The Times has had articles on their websites about it. Headlines from the last two weeks alone can be seen in this slideshow.
As Google / Youtube has enacted a series of high-handed, opaque changes to how Youtube monetizes, upranks and censors videos, Youtubers have found themselves battered by the changes: they built Youtube into a global multi-billion-dollar success story, but they don’t get a say in how it’s managed. Now, a group of Youtubers have teamed up with Germany’s powerful IG Metall trade union to fight back, using Europe’s broad privacy laws and Germany’s broad labor laws to force the company to come to the negotiating table and give them a say in how the service is run.
The move is one of the most significant organized labor actions taken by creators on the platform, and puts some actual union power behind what has thus far been a nascent and disorganized movement.
In recent years, YouTube creators have consistently spoken out about changes to the massive platform that they say they are rarely consulted on that affect their ability to make money. For example, YouTube has repeatedly changed how it handles copyright takedown requests (allowing copyright holders to assert copyright on and monetize videos that they didn’t upload, for example.) YouTube has also controversially “demonetized” or issued content warnings to some innocuous channels.
The campaign has asked YouTube to address content creators’ concerns by August 23. If YouTube fails to respond, IG Metall threatens to enact consequences through a number of possible legal actions, including probing YouTube’s data privacy practice under Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and launching a legal case over whether YouTube should consider content creators employees under the EU law.
