Private owners went to the effort of collecting it. Other people can start doing so at any time.

YouTube offers free hosting and is widely available. Presumably that’s why it was chosen to host these videos. Other people cannot duplicate YouTube. VCs financed YouTube to build a free service with network effects that allow them to turn around and charge rent on the one hand and exercise capricious control on the other. It’s not in the public interest to allow these billionaires to retain control of these companies. Their control over these rent seeking enterprises directly conflicts with the public interest. This incident, erasing political ads, is an egregious example of private entities using their wealth to silence essential public discourse.

Monopolies are not easy to crack.

This is a content-free dismissal. The existence of an effective monopoly in records retrieval for previously published data does not affect your ability to collect presently published data.

It's not the digital commons, mostly because that's not a thing. The EU could've kept the ads they uploaded, but they didn't.

Arbitrarily labeling a private, multi-billion dollar infrastructure as a "digital commons" reeks of hubris and entitlement.

I think this is quite a bit more complex when you’re talking about products that operate as common carriers. The historical social contract we have with these services is that we treat them as the digital commons.

Clearly that has changed, but you’ll have to forgive folks for treating the internet as it has been in the ~20 years previous to the current chaos.

The billionaire owners of these systems are the entitled ones. They profit by using VC money to offer something for free, then turning around to exploit network effects and lock-in so they can charge the working class various forms of rent for what they’ve built.