YouTube is already the default video platform on the Web.

Reason enough to do this. If it's the first video destination of choice, why not take advantage of that?

...criticism for its acquiescence to the authoritarian wishes of the government of the People's Republic of China...

This could just as easily be read as a recognition of reality as constituted in the business climate of China. And please, give us one or two simple declarative sentences on why no Google at all is better for China than part of Google. And make them brief, as we all know lengthy discourses are more often attempts at circumlocution than explanation.

Given the uncomfortably close relationship between Google execs and Obama, should we be worried about this?

Absolutely.

The convenience of YouTube being the "first video destination of choice" is utterly irrelevant. Imagine the outcry from the open source crowd if the Government mandated that all presentations had to be released as PowerPoint decks.

I may be biased because YouTube videos don't run natively on my cell phone.

I can follow the argument about Open Source codecs, but my recollection is that it's taken years to optimize video compression codecs, and it's been a long, exhausting ride.

Until now, it wasn't possible to have the kind of problem you raise. But once online video became more widely used (and I predict that it will continue to grow exponentially), then there had to be organized ways to share it.

YouTube does that well enough.
And IIRC, it uses that Flash wrapper, which at its core is the old Sorenson Squeeze file compression codec.

Now maybe a whole lot of people want to reinvent the wheel, and that's fine.
But I do recall the early days of the Toobz, and I also don't even want to count the number of hours of my life completely squandered and wasted dealing with browser conflicts, and other really stupid issues that at their core all boiled down to a lack of standards.

As I understand you, you are saying, "We shouldn't have a private company be defining the standard."
Okay, I see your point, and it's valid.

But on a day-to-day basis, what I really need is 'what works'.
Cause I'm really tired of things that don't.

YouTube works.

But I think that there are social and cultural and institutional dynamics at work, also.

I have yet to see successful entreprenurial behavior or outcomes from inside bureaucracies (unless you count Dick Cheney and the DoJ's OLC division that created torture memos, but that's not a technical topic).

I have yet to see bureaucracies innovate.
They also don't seem to be culturally adapted to the concepts of 'best practices' or the kind of consensus on standards that drive the W3C.

Government worries about meeting the law.
W3C worries about making things work well, on a voluntary basis.

Between the two, IMHO, the W3C is the more adaptative entity, and it better structured to electronic networks. Google is closer to that model than the US government seems to be. But I'd put that kind of 'goal oriented, best practices' model out as a goal.

It seems that letting the government put up YouTubes, BUT ALSO post the raw mov or wav files on the same page, to be downloaded on demand, would be the best of both worlds.

People who want the media can grab it and use it easily, while people who want the info can view it.

The issue of server hits for downloads is a biggie, I can see that is a big deal.

So maybe each division could have designated server 'download space', and the YouTube pages could each have links to other servers that could handle the downloads?

Just an idea...

Now, the minicams and the Apple Quicktime and the

Obama relied heavily on YouTube to do his virtual campaigning last year.

Oh noes! Candidate trailing the "inevitable" nominee uses free media! This really is a slap in the face bus throwing under. I can't believe that candidate Hopey would be so mean as to go where the eyeballs are.

It's worth noting that all of the videos on change.gov are cross-posted on YouTube, Vimeo, and Yahoo. A high-resolution MP4 file of each video is also available for download, and all of the content on the site is under a Creative Commons license.

I think this YouTube agreement is simply a matter of convenience, and I'm sure it's not exclusive. Most staffers probably just don't have the technical skills or the time to deal with multiple services for each video.

I think that the debate is somewhat not in focus. The problem is not the technology itself, but the fact that Google, though it gives free services, is a private company with very clear economic interests that is given a free ride from the new administration without any contracts and transparent competition. Google is not giving Obama this free channel for nothing, but for (probably unofficial for the time being) future collaboration or indirect profit (through advertisements and drawing audience to their website). And though it might seem like the easy solution in the short term, there's no reason why the government cannot supply citizens with this information not through the mediation of a private company. If to think about the analogy in TV terms, it's like deciding that all press conferences from now on will be broadcast only by CNN, because it's the most popular network that broadcasts all over the world. For anyone who cares about the influence of money on government and transparency, this should be a reason for concern.

The problem is not the technology itself, but the fact that Google, though it gives free services, is a private company with very clear economic interests that is given a free ride from the new administration without any contracts and transparent competition.

I don't see anything like this in the linked article. It says:

General Services Administration officials are negotiating with Google’s YouTube about the rules governing posting government videos on YouTube, a GSA official said today.

The negotiations focus on YouTube’s terms of service, said Tobi Edler, a GSA spokeswoman.

What I get from this article is that the current administration is trying to get YouTube to loosen some of its terms of service, to set standards for videos posted by government agencies. I see nothing about a "free ride," and nothing about a lack of competition. As I pointed out above, Obama is already being as open as anyone could want on the official transistion site.

When I skimmed over this article at first, I assumed it was about the new official YouTube channels for Congress: I see now that, apparently, no one has mentioned those yet. I don't know why we're debating a theoretical exclusivity agreement that doesn't seem to exist, when we could be talking about a new, very public arrangement that does exist.

Your posting leaves gaps in its explication, leaving me scratching my head wondering if you think an exclusive arrangement with Google is the problem or if any use of Google at all is the problem. Either way, I think you're way down into the paranoid weeds on this one.

The U.S. government needs to give every outlet an equal chance to dispense its information, and I think that is what is happening here. Reading the comment above mine by Designbot makes me think that this is what's happening and that your post is blowing off steam for some other UNDISCLOSED reason. What is your real beef with google?

One of the things I cannot figure out about the Obama transition, about to be Presidency, is that he taught Constitutional law, right? And yet, I feel like he really has demonstrated, ever since getting elected, a very weak grasp of fundamentals of American-style democracy.

I expect to hear from the end of the bar when I go out of a drink that it would be a good idea to privatize everything in government without much thought about why we need government to do some things independently, with accountability, etc. I'm not accusing Obama of being that far gone, but there have been times since Nov 8 when I've looked at the choices he and his team are making and I think: "It's not just about a 'post-racial' or 'post-partisan' America. It's about a 'post-America' space where the constructs of law are seen as one set of verbal constructs having no more particular value than another. If that's the cast of his thinking, I'm concerned.