Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is a US federal law that has been in effect for a long time. But because the US Federal Trade Commission has expressed dissatisfaction in the way YouTube is making sure the law is obeyed on YouTube, the company has announced that the following changes will be effective of January 2020:
- Content creators will be obligated to inform YouTube if any video is for children.
- Videos for children can no longer have personalized ads on them, which may lead to lower ad revenue for some content creators.
- There will be no comments or likes/dislikes in videos for children, that is, no engagement.
YouTube uses machine learning to identify content for children and if a content creator has failed to appropriately tagged their content as children's content, that may lead to consequences on YouTube or even a $42,000 fine. Some of the biggest content creators on YouTube make gameplay videos YouTube's algorithms are likely to classify as children's content. The way YouTube is planning to go about enforcing COPPA, will kill engagement between them and their fans.
This is where a content creator having their content stored on a public blockchain as well as on some type of decentralized content delivery network as in case of binary files in Steem posts is golden. Even better is the fact that a content creator can have their network of followers and interactions with them be recorded on a permissionless and uncensorable blockchain. Even you agree on the necessity to protect children online, who knows what types of content legislators might go after next. Adult content creators are one example of a type of content creator whose business models could be seriously harmed by legislative overreach. And that's just one example.