This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
There’s been this tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats at the FCC for like a solid decade or more now about whether the internet is classified as a “communications service” or an “information service.” If it’s classified as a communications service then the FCC has regulatory authority and can do things like enforce net neutrality. If it’s classified as an information service, then the Federal Comminications Commission does not have authority to regulate it. The Biden FCC had been working to bring back net neutrality, but all that is pretty much out the window with a GOP toady in charge of the FCC now.
It really needs to be codified by congress to have sticking power for it to be regulated by the FCC or the tug-of-war for how to refulate the internet will continue indefinitely.
I’m fairly sure the Communications Commission regulates information services. Even this guy at the notorious Federalist Society’s blog says it does.