MagicKarpet.org

It may look a bit of a shortcut, but this is really what have answered Youtube's users when they have been asked what they would like to see change in the world's number one video content provider. More than anything else, maybe because of writings from mozilla officials, users want open format videos. The poll is not over yet, but at the moment I write this, roughly 25,000 people have submitted about 2,500 ideas and cast nearly 300,000 votes; the most voted idea so far (more than 6,000 liked it, less than 200 didn't) is Youtube to support Ogg/Theora/HTML5, and to only serve Flash™ videos as a fallback when the browser doesn't support "more advanced features". This idea has an enormous amount of very similar requests.

I don't know if all these voters actually are open source geeks, or if this is the sign that a very significant part of the Internet population has understood how important open formats are. While I fear the first option is the explanation, I hope that the second one is true, and I can only be happy about this strong signal being sent to Google. With lots of depressing news in the digital world about ACTA these days, this is all good news for freedom, people do care about it.

Also mentionned in the survey, the users:

• suggest usability features (I wonder if Youtube expected to have only that kind of messages).
• complain a lot about DMCA requests filed in too quickly, resulting in many false positives and deleted content.
• wish to see Youtube integrate with peer-to-peer distribution systems.

I'm also very happy that I'm not the first one to have suggested the last item. This is a key point towards a more symmetric, Net neutral, read-write Internet for any user. If from any computer in the world people can retrieve but also feed Youtube's video content, I expect other content distributors to mimic that, and it may push ISPs to provide symmetric connection to the Internet (they would lose customers if they don't) and refrain them (and governments) from filtering content (because of the volume of content going in two directions). Remember that so far, what we really have at home is quite like a one-way Internet.

Please then, don't hesitate to vote, and just after, if you're living in Europe and really care about freedom, go and support La Quadrature du Net, a french association that is fighting for, among others, Net neutrality on the political front. This fight has become a full-time activity for some of their members, and they can't survive without a financial support. If you're not living in Europe, you can choose to help the Electronic Frontier Fondation.