In a nutshell, this is the same as to what Ripple / XRP has been accused of, the difference being that Ripple had better lawyers and probably more money, than LBRY.
> The SEC alleged that LBRY, Inc. had sold LBRY credits (LBC) to fund their work without registering them with the SEC as a security, a violation of securities laws. In response, LBRY's CEO began a public relations campaign to gather support among blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and to argue that the SEC had mislabeled LBC as a security. On November 7, 2022, the SEC won the lawsuit when Judge Paul Barbadoro of the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire granted the SEC's motion for summary judgment. In 2023, LBRY was forced to close due to fines related to SEC fines.
They made it the biggest pain in the ass possible to set up independent instances and went all in on the coin, so I don't have high hopes. Very disappointing, since it was quite a good program.
I try rumble again every few months... I mostly use YouTube on my android tv box (NVidia Shield TV), and the experience is generally better than Rumble. As much as I'd prefer not to be tied to Google, given how much content they suppress, it kind of sucks overall.
It's hard to get a sense of new/good content from those that I follow without having to check each channel manually. Which may be fine for some, but on YouTube as a contrasting for instance I'm following like 150+ channels on various topics of interest. Rumble is about 30 and already difficult to manage.
This is going to be an interesting experiment on the supposed decentralization of many of these networks. Corps that maintain some of these have folded before, but they were all either scams or barely used. LBRY is actually widely used, so we can get a real world example of how these sorts of things turn out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY
> The SEC alleged that LBRY, Inc. had sold LBRY credits (LBC) to fund their work without registering them with the SEC as a security, a violation of securities laws. In response, LBRY's CEO began a public relations campaign to gather support among blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and to argue that the SEC had mislabeled LBC as a security. On November 7, 2022, the SEC won the lawsuit when Judge Paul Barbadoro of the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire granted the SEC's motion for summary judgment. In 2023, LBRY was forced to close due to fines related to SEC fines.