Will YouTube follow in Google’s footsteps and end up in an antitrust lawsuit?

In the wake of a court ruling that Google acted as a monopoly by illegally dominating the internet search market, many are wondering: Is YouTube next?

Managing editor for Blaze Media’s Return Peter Gietl joins Jill Savage and the “Blaze News Tonight” panel to discuss whether or not YouTube could also be subject to an antitrust lawsuit.

“Should YouTube be investigated for potential antitrust violations?” asks Jill.

“Absolutely,” is Gietl’s answer.

“They’ve exhibited behavior for going on decades now of collusion and monopolistic practices – stifling competitors, price gouging, price fixing. I mean there’s really an argument to be made for this,” he says.

Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson wonders “how we got to this situation” in the first place.

According to Gietl, it all started in the mid-90s when DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a research and development agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, funded Google for the sake of creating online libraries.

Seems innocent enough.

However, online libraries weren't the only thing DARPA was funding.

“They wanted the ability to track search queries,” says Gietl. “They thought if they could keep track of different groups and what they were searching, it would be an extremely powerful tool to track the population.”

“Google came out of that original funding, so they’ve had a long and storied history of collusion with the alphabet agencies,” he explains.

Today, “Google controls 90% of search, and I think most of the rest of it runs through YouTube, which is also owned by Google,” Gietl continues. “Any business that wants to advertise has to play in their sandbox, and they have to follow their rules, and they control basically all of the online advertising and search queries in the entire world.”

“We know that they're suppressing the content of conservatives and conservative speech,” says Jill, pointing to how Blaze content is constantly warring against censorship barriers.

Gietl says that while we technically are a free market, society no longer operates as such, given that the smaller entities are up against “giant players,” like Google, “that wield tremendous amounts of power.”

“Like any company on the right, [Blaze Media] would prefer not to be in business with these people at all,” says Peterson, “but the problem is if you want to reach people and you actually want to generate revenue, you don't have an alternative ecosystem that's large enough to do that.”

“When we put out a video onto YouTube and we talk about certain topics, we know that we'll be demonetized, that we will be taken down, that they'll shut our whole channel down,” he laments, adding that that’s why it’s so important to get your content directly from the source.

“This is why we need you to just subscribe and support us directly, because the more people that do that, the more we don't have to worry about any of this,” he says.

“Do you think this court decision against Google will have any real-life impact?” Peterson asks.

To hear Gietl’s answer, watch the clip above.

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