Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.
If it's true that it isn't profitable how would anti-trust laws make it better? If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more Youtube. That doesn't seem like a better outcome than what we have today.
So it must be profitable to even begin to consider anti-trust regulation. Personally I think it is profitable although it likely has a very long time to recuperate investments (since it's mostly infrastructure like fiber, peering, caching accelerators, etc).
You have to look back at Microsoft's Antitrust case around Internet Explorer, the were bundling the software into the operating system for free to kill any competition.
It maybe a loss leader but it plays into an overall corporate strategy.
Splitting YouTube off would not trigger it to go bankrupt, market forces would come into play, they'd have to seek revenue and others players would come into the market to offer a competitive offering.
I think that ideally the legal problems that lead to stuff like content-id being necessary should be resolved so that you could theoretically have competitors but why should the thing that is a huge moneysink be forcibly removed from the company that sustains it?
I am definitely in the top 1% of people that hate Google but I fear that anyone besides Google would be pruning videos from Youtube at an amazing clip.
TicTok, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, FB Video, Vimeo, Netflix etc all are counterexamples.
