YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 349 points –
YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
404media.co

Google's anti-ad scripts are breaking browsers and privacy plugins. It could get worse because Google controls the ad market, Chrome, and the extension store.

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The irony of this post being behind a paywall

This is a dumb take. Being behind a paywall means it's not controlled by Google and its ad network.

Are these webpages and people just supposed to work for free?

Is hosting YouTube infrastructure free?

I pay for YouTube and I think people need to stop complaining so much about ads if they're not willing to support the infrastructure or the creators they likely watch hours and hours of content from.

I also think Google is charging too much and should decouple music from videos, but that's another subject.

I also pay for YouTube. I just don't normally bring it up because it usually results in a lot of rather unpleasant replies.

It's fascinating, really.

Google gets a lot of hate for being a data collection behemoth. The whole "if you aren't paying, you are the product" thing. And rightfully so.

And pirates love to say that if companies would just charge a reasonable rate for an easy-to-use service, then they would just pay instead of pirating.

But when it comes to YouTube, a lot of people seem to want to have it both ways.

404 media in particular do great work. They're all defectors from Motherboard (vice) and I think supporting them is both worthwhile and worth it.