GP and I are apparently from that universe where you remember that YouTube wasn't the only popular video on demand game in town and, e.g., Vimeo is older than YouTube. They only won because they didn't charge you for uploading or watching. They could afford to undercut the competition since they were bought by Google.

They were also somehow the only ones that offered music videos without being shut down.

Dailymotion, Google Video, sevenload, german TV stations RTL and Pro7 even launched Clipfish and MyVideo respectively to compete with youtube. Youtube happens to be the only one that survived on Googles ad model, the others very quickly realized that paid premium content is much easier to handle (copyright, CSAM) and monetize.

There wasn't but consider the context: at the time YouTube was an almost purely piracy platform most likely the biggest on the planet if quantified in IP dollar value - yet was magically not shut down by the government. How unfair to the competition is that? Remember that other piracy based sites were raided in that era. But when Google started acquiring it, it was very quickly above the law. YouTube should not exist.

- fair use was also sot as permissive in that era! Web 2.0 coerced a legal shift -