@lamp @divVerent >This harm is real
I don't see why delivering traffic via the internet is harmful, as that's literally what it's for.

It just increases costs, as there are rent seekers on the internet's fibre's that demand they receive a payment for every single byte that is transmitted over the fibres (in either direction).

youtube does not cache on ISPs - google just runs their own massive networks and datacentres and are happy to let any ISP peer with them - the result is the spying data going directly to google's datacentres and the video's coming directly from google's datacentres (whether on premise, or from another google datacentre), bypassing rent seekers.