YouTube and the New Cultural Sovereignty

YouTube allies itself with Netflix and Amazon, enters TIFF and keeps growing while the Oscars reduce the filter of nation-states: the guardians of culture are changing.

Within a matter of days, Google’s platform became an official partner of TIFF and its new market, launched a lobbying coalition in Washington with Netflix and Amazon, and moved deeper into an ecosystem in which even the Oscars — whose exclusive global rights it will hold from 2029 — have just reduced the power of national committees over international films.

YouTube, Netflix and Amazon: from competition to power

Netflix, Amazon and YouTube have created the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance, placing it under the direction of TechNet.

The immediate spark is growing scrutiny from U.S. regulators over the transfer of sports rights from traditional television to streaming; three companies competing for every available minute of the user’s time have discovered that they share interests when it comes to writing the rules of the field on which they compete.

YouTube, which grew through a kind of production Hollywood once considered amateur, is no longer merely asking to be recognized as media: it is asking to take part in defining the conditions under which media will be regulated. In July 2026, driven by the World Cup, it reached 14.2% of all television viewing time in the United States, a record share higher than that of any other distributor measured.

The lobby, in other words, is not there to win some future power, but to defend politically the power already won on the screen.

YouTube at TIFF: the creator becomes industrial material

The same qualitative leap is emerging in Toronto. YouTube became Official Festival Partner and Official Partner of TIFF: The Market and, with Variety, organized a summit dedicated to creators. The symbolic case is Curry Barker, who went from an approximately $800 feature released on YouTube to Obsession: made for only $750,000, presented at TIFF 2025, sold to Focus Features for $14–15 million and then able to surpass $500 million at the worldwide box office. More than scouting, this is now a production pipeline.

The doors have therefore only multiplied: some carry the logo of a festival, others that of a platform, while still others are invisible and are called recommendation, engagement, discovery. YouTube is interesting because it is moving through all of these rooms: it brings creators into festivals, is watched by studios and appears alongside the other giants when it is time to discuss the rules. Cinema may therefore become less national, less dependent on traditional routes into the studios and even more accessible, without automatically becoming freer.

International Oscars, when the state no longer controls the door

The Academy has also opened a crack in its own system. For the 99th Oscars, a non-English-language film will be eligible to be submitted not only through its country’s official committee, but also by winning one of the qualifying prizes at Berlin, Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Toronto or Venice. At TIFF, for example, the Platform Award counts.

On one side, the monopoly of the nation-state in deciding which work may represent it is reduced; on the other, the weight of transnational infrastructures — festivals, markets and platforms — grows in determining what manages to gain international visibility and legitimacy.

NAZA, the documentary by Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor awarded the Special Jury Prize in Venice, was openly repudiated by the institutions of the country it depicts. Benjamin Netanyahu called it “shocking incitement”; Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused the two directors of treason and went so far as to demand that their Israeli citizenship be revoked, while military leaders considered possible legal action against the film.

In a system increasingly less bounded by national borders, an author rejected, censored or simply unwelcome to their own country’s committee can now, at least in some cases, find another route. The state filter is beginning to lose its exclusivity and the gatekeepers, rather than disappearing, are changing uniforms.