“It’s just more reliable than YouTube, ok? “

That was the response of a friend currently in Rwanda who had issued a Facebook plea for someone to upload the weird “Innocence of Muslims” video to Dropbox.

“Oh, where is the stupid internet in Rwanda?????” she exclaimed.

In typical snark, I had asked, “What do you connect to Dropbox with? Tin-can on string?”

She actually has Internet access, but she finds YouTube so much less reliable than other platforms that she asks friends to upload YouTube videos elsewhere.

I anecdotally find YouTube videos to be clunky downloads compared to others. Quite naturally, I watch fewer videos on YouTube and more on other platforms. I don’t know, but guess, that Google has made some decision to economize on video downloads—a high percentage of people probably watch only the first third of any video, so why send them the whole thing right away?—and that its imperfect implementation has me watching the spinning “pause” wheel (or playing “snake”) routinely when I think a YouTube offering would be interesting.

Would the Google of five years have allowed that? It’s well known that Google recognizes speed as an important elements of quality service on the Internet.

And this is why antitrust action against Google is unwarranted. When companies get big, they lose their edge, as I’m guessing Google is losing its edge in video service. This opens the door to competitors as part of natural economic processes.

Just the other week, I signed up with Media.net and I’ll soon be running tests on whether it gets better results for me on WashingtonWatch.com than Google AdSense. So far so good. A human customer service representative navigated me through the (simple) process of opening an account and getting their ad code.

These are anecdotes suggesting Google’s competitive vulnerability. But you can get a more systematic airing of views at TechFreedom’s event September 28th: “Should the FTC Sue Google Over Search?“

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