Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, a new hurdle for the Sprint T-Mobile merger and what we really want from our news media.

But first, YouTube Under Fire. So it's been a rough few weeks for the Google-owned video streaming giant, a lot of which was encapsulated in an incident last week involving conservative YouTube host Stephen Crowder,

who has nearly 4 million followers and a Vox journalist named Carlos Mazza.

In short, Crowder has been hurling homophobic and racial insults at Mazza for years via

YouTube, and it received added attention after they were compiled

in a so-called supercut. So YouTube last Tuesday said that after several days of investigating,

Crowder's comments, while hurtful, didn't violate its rules. Then one day later, it made a policy

change addressing less targeted forms of hate speech, something it said had been

in the works for months and addressed supremacist content, like Nazi propaganda.

But it said those new rules didn't apply to the Crowder situation.

But then, literally just three hours later and after lots of criticism, YouTube suspended

Crowder from its program that lets creators run ads and share in revenue from its videos.

In YouTube's words, Crowder had demonstrated, quote, a pattern of egregious actions that has

harmed the broader community, end quote. So again, this Crowder-Maza thing is a one-off situation,

but it's reflective of YouTube's larger troubles when it comes to controversial content.

Should it draw lines? If so,

where does it draw those lines? And at the very least, could have come up with a clearer set of

guidelines so that people at least have something specific to be angry about. The bottom line here,

YouTube does not want to be in this situation, even though its parent company is all about

ranking content based on perceived

value.

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