Exactly. Reverse DNS lookup matters in some situations.

That’s true but it doesn’t solve the problem now.

I think what you mean to say is that we should be pressuring public officials to try to bust up Google’s monopoly on many things. And we are doing that, and it is showing some progress. But there is much more work to be done.

YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.

I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.

And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.

It’s certainly true that the system is broken, but at the same time you’re suggesting we should forgive HR employees for the bad stuff they do, and I don’t think that’s how morality works.

Not only that, we all understand that sometimes employees don’t have control of a situation and they’re going to follow company policy or go along with their bosses. But we can see through their words and their body language how they feel about it, and we can recognize small actions that they could take to make a bad situation slightly less bad. In my experience it’s very rare that you will encounter such behavior in HR, because the vast majority of HR workers are perfectly happy to f*** us over as much as they can.

Last year I was talking with a veteran coworker who was worried about where the company was going to end up in 10 years, but my contract ends in a year and will not be renewed. I told her openly, they’re not paying me to think about 10 years from now, they’re paying me to make the next year a good year, and I don’t really care about the long-term future cuz I won’t be here. She was furious, but she wasn’t furious enough to go get me a long-term contract. I think she never saw the hypocrisy; even today she still thinks that I’m a bad worker.

You can buy loyalty. Give someone a high paying 3-year contract and they’ll probably work to the end of it. But of course HR doesn’t want to hear that.