I really don't think Google even wants YouTube. I think they'd be more than happy to buy the personal data of customers from a competitor. I think their problem is that no one wants to compete because
it costs unreal amounts of money to store the amount of data that YouTube does, let alone the legal fees they must swallow each year. At this point, I imagine that they simply take the anti-consumer choice whenever a dilemma comes up in the hopes that it might finally be the bullet to put them out of their money-losing misery.
1. It's the second largest search engine in the world, and likely the GO TO search engine for any DIY / Howto type topic. Keeping control of this keeps them in control of search field.
2. It's a massive platform for adsense. Having a single stop for advertisers on both the web and on youtube helps keep google ahead of it's competitors in advertising
3. The unspoken advantage it gives google in the world of machine language and AI. Endless natural language data in every language you can imagine, facial recognition, etc etc.
Oh they do. What you're sensing is Google's lack of any kind of respect or care for their content creators or customers. You'll see this across every product they offer. Google develops systems that suits themselves, puts pressure on the rest of the internet so that nobody can compete, then they stagnate and sometimes fail leaving no real alternative.
Does Google care when their products fail? No, they just move on to the next data vacuum one of their developers designed or that they acquired.
