Personally, I find this very sad.
Obviously I have no idea how a company like Youtube works as a business. So bear with me if my comments are childish or whatever.
So WTF is RED. If youtube wanted their 2 bucks, instead of shutting down user stuff, they could've easily done the opposite, and went with cool paid-content for things like live concerts or early showings of pvs/movies or whatever (which they'll probably do anyways when they actually wake up).
But instead, they strongarm every user on their list like a school bully.
Fans now obviously hate them with all their fan videos blocked (its not like fans are putting up entire movies or something, just snippets of stuff to try making other ppl interested in things they like. music, movies games, etc. Worse for guys that put their hearts into making their vids). What's worse is how unclear it is, everyone is totally confused.
Viewers can't see channels, even official ones. Thanks for destroying our daily entertainment YT/Google.
And businesses/video providers get their channels blocked, then threatened to pay up and join RED or die. Again, very friendly there YT/Google.
I'm not in the US so it aint affecting me, yet.
The vids I upload to YT are just for sharing to the guys here, getting their 20-100 views. So it ain't important, I can totally post them somewhere else in the future. And like alohano says, AKB stuff can be found everywhere.
AKS will probably join RED for zero worries (nowadays AKS probably get problems thinking where to spend their mountains of money anyways, what's with throwing a little change on the floor).
Or say "F*** you" and easily jump ship to Nico Nico or somewhere. I think they'll go the easy way though. They don't need to waste time/effort.
Of course, this ain't just AKB. Many other channels are being affected.
But I just see this huge missed opportunity where YT could negotiate streaming events live/early like AKB's senbatsu sousenkyo/janken (which they did do once a few years ago. and it was good). Same for other artists. And make it paid content. We would literally throw our money their way for stuff like this (they'd get a lot more $$ from this than from their stupid RED policy).
Instead, they just went all Hitler on everyone. I know its a business, but they could've done it with a little more style. Was it really worth it to have their brand name smudged.