Michelle Malkin relates her experiences, and links to a major article by James Rosen in the New York Times titled "Google's Gatekeepers." Remember, it is Google who owns YouTube.
From Rosen's New York Times article
With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches,
as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who
can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment
of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the
company’s decision-making process about what controversial
user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other
applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa,
the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and
her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what
controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search
engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well
as on Google.com. As a
result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the
contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet. . .
“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get. . .
There is also the question of what Google does with what users write, search, and view:
“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.
. . . Google, which refused to discuss its data-purging policies on the record, has raised the suspicion of advocacy groups like Privacy International. Google announced in September that it would anonymize all the I.P. addresses on its server logs after nine months. Until that time, however, it will continue to store a wealth of personal information about our search results and viewing habits — in part to improve its targeted advertising and therefore its profits. As Wu suggests, it would be a catastrophe for privacy and free speech if this information fell into the wrong hands. [ my emphases ]