At the end of April, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO, had an announcement for those who wished to upload content to the preeminent video platform: The platform will remove any videos that have “problematic” information about the Wuhan Virus.

It appears now that YouTube decided that a man who holds doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, is “problematic” for disagreeing with the World Health Organization, because his video, with 1.4 million views, just disappeared. The federal government and the states, however, may provide a solution to the tech giant problem.

In the CNN interview in which she announced YouTube's censorious policy, Wojcicki expanded upon what constituted “problematic” content. YouTube wasn’t just concerned with folk remedies, such as “ ‘Take Vitamin C . . . take turmeric.’ ” Instead, YouTube decided that the World Health Organization, which first wrongly downplayed the virus and then lied about China’s role, is the gold standard. “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy,” she said.

It was almost certainly fealty to this standard that led YouTube to remove a video by Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, who is critical of the lockdown approach to the virus:

Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, says YouTube removed a video of him talking about the virus which had racked up more than 1.3 million views.

Wittkowski, 65, is a ferocious critic of the nation’s current steps to fight the coronavirus. He has derided social distancing, saying it only prolongs the virus’ existence and has attacked the current lockdown as mostly unnecessary.

Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to achieve “herd immunity,” and that short of a vaccine the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.

“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he says in the now-deleted video.

If you’re curious about the Wittkowski video, you can see it here (assuming you can get it to load, something that’s not usually a problem at YouTube). You’ll notice that it tracks the actual data about the virus, rather than kowtowing to the defective models that dictated (and still dictate) most governments’ approaches to the Wuhan virus.

To appreciate how dangerous it is that YouTube is engaging in this type of censorship, you have to appreciate how big Google and YouTube, a Google subsidiary, really are:

As of August 2018, the website is ranked as the second-most popular site in the world, according to Alexa Internet, just behind Google.^[2] As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.^[7] Based on reported quarterly advertising revenue, YouTube is estimated to have US$15 billion in annual revenues.

YouTube and Google are run by all those good college students who dutifully imbibed the constant stream of leftist indoctrination poured into them during their years at college campuses in America and Europe. At YouTube, this ideology means that they’re reasonably comfortable with anti-Semitic bile but have de-platformed Prager University so that the videos are hidden in search engines and cannot be viewed in schools.

Help may on the horizon, although not in the form of the government dictating content, which would trade the Google monopoly for an even more powerful, government monopoly. Instead, we may see some old-fashioned trust-busting, a la the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil.

It appears that the Justice Department is drafting a lawsuit against Google based upon allegations that it’s violating antitrust laws. The focus is on its control of the digital advertising market. It appears too that myriad state attorney generals are also eying suits against Google.

Trump is certainly enthusiastic about breaking the power of these hard-left tech monopolies:

The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle! https://t.co/ZQfcfD3Hk9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020

Although I’m not a fan of the government interfering in matters of either speech or the free market, things are a bit different here. Given how big these tech outlets are, this is one of those rare instances that cannot rely on the marketplace and competition to weaken Google’s and YouTube’s strangleholds on the exchange of ideas in America. Too many people have invested too much data in them to walk away.

I’ve written before about the fact that these outlets are public accommodations in the same sense as restaurants and lodgings were when the federal government enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, to the extent these repositories of information are trafficking in ideas, one shouldn’t need an act to impose upon them the obligation to abide by the First Amendment. It's time to break down these conglomerates, making them appropriately vulnerable to the forces of free-market competition.