Very few people even within this peer group have the capability of hosting videos on their own website unless the video is intended for a very small audience (say, less than 1000 viewers per day).
If you want to reach any significant number of people, you absolutely need to go through one of the major video hosters or pay for a CDN. And that's before you consider the network effects of YouTube.
There's no reason why they should be able to use the infrastructure of private companies to scale their message as much as they want.
Or they can just pay for a CDN as you say. This just highlights the differences between the West and China even more. In the west, harmful messages need to stand on their own two feet. If they don't have support, then they can be kicked off private platforms. No need for the government to intervene.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle...
> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.
> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.
So CF bans even remotely right leaning content but claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:
> you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation
Voicing my opinion on a public forum is one way to do that.
This argument ends with "just build an entirely parallel internet". It incentivises radicalism inside tech and communication companies. It incentivises the "play to win" mentality we see in universities in which the hard left relentlessly attacks anyone they disagree with using any tactic they can get away with, which are often illegal tactics when the rules are enforced by people who agree with them.
This stuff ends with a totally lawless society, a la China. It's the logical end-game of allowing the hard left to dominate: the rules are just words on paper, what matters is your ideological loyalty to authority. We can see it happening before our eyes and it's terrifying.
Even putting Webtorrent aside, a simple server with a gigabit connection allows you to handle a hundred simultaneous viewers at once with a reasonable bitrate, all day long. If you're constantly getting more than that, you can surely afford a CDN or a proper infrastructure.
I do agree that the network effects of YouTube are very hard to compete with, however.