That has almost no value to them unless they can use that to show you ads. They use that data to target ads to you, that is the whole point. Do you think they care about what you do or who you are for any other reason?
55%? You mean Google shared the metadata and the resulting profile it build of you across the web 55% with the creator?
Obviously not. They give a pittance of what they make with a single ad while continuing to use the data they acquire for as long as they want without you having any say in the matter. They simply steal this "useless" data and make billions year over year.
I don't know what fantasy realm you live in where people are "trading" with Google when they watch a YouTube video. No such thing happens. No money changes hands, there is no transaction.
What does happen, is I make a request, and Google sends some bits to me over the Internet for free, and then those bits are sitting on my PC, and my PC is my property. I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it. If I want to transform the bits in some way, render video from some of them and not from others, all on my PC in my own home, then I can. With a few exceptions, courts have upheld that general right. Ad blocking isn't illegal, circumventing their anti-ad blocking isn't illegal, and it doesn't interfere with a "trade" because there wasn't one, Google just sends some bits for free to anyone who asks the right way.
Now Google can of course choose to refuse service to me for any reason they want. They can make their anti-ad blocking more sophisticated. That's fine, I'll use a competitor in that case, and we need to make sure the government enforces the antitrust laws on the books so that there's more competition against Google anyway. Whether YouTube is a criminal monopoly or not is currently up for debate, probably the answer is yes.
At any rate your understanding of the relationship is legally and morally flawed. You claim there is a trade between me and a probably criminal organization, where in fact there is none. On the other hand my right to control my property is one of the most fundamental rights out there. You better believe Google feels that way about their property and spends billions to protect/expand their own property rights!
So I am confused as to why you want Google to have property rights, but not the rest of us.
But hey, "You will own nothing and be happy," right? We're all really just renting our hardware I guess? It's 2023 and the concept of us little peons owning and controlling anything is obsolete, just do what Master says right?
BTW, FWIW my property rights are inalienable. I possess these rights because I was born a human, yes they are also upheld in the US Constitution, UN Declaration on Human rights etc. While government has mostly upheld them they don't come from government, they come from us being born human, so even if a government said what I was doing was illegal, it would be moral to ignore that government, resist and do it anyway. What's crazy to me is that people seem to be OK with handwaving away a basic human right just so that a corporation can make more profit off of entertainment content.
By your logic, because you own your hardware and can do whatever you want with it, you should be allowed to hack into other computers. After all, it's just pressing keys on a keyboard you own and sending bits from a computer you own?
Your incredibly reductionist take does not consider the fact that you exist in an ecosystem of relationships and economics.
That’s not what he’s saying. The statement is that he’s free to manipulate his computer as his property and since all the data that resides on it. There are exceptions to this, namely when it comes to infringing on the rights of others, but with the case of client side data the argument stands true.
The flaw in your thinking comes from not knowing that one can acknowledge property rights without the notion that anything can be done with their property. A baseball bat may be mine but it doesn’t mean I have the right to hit someone else’s property with it. I can, however, paint, carve, or otherwise destroy my bat without serious consequence.
Nope. Wrong. That other system is someone else's property. You don't have the right to vandalize someone else's property, ergo, breaking into another system over the network and causing damage to it is illegal.
Property laws are just as relevant to computer systems as they are to anything else.
I'm working on that. The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.
Anyway, the value they receive is incidental: if I like content, I'll tell my friends about it. Not all of my friends dislike ads. I "market" the content via word of mouth. The content markets the subscriptions. Or the ads. Either one.
If I stop watching the content entirely (due to it becoming harder to discover) then fewer of my friends know about it. So it's not quite as black and white as you want it to be. The "grifting" population helps content to spread to the paying population.
> The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.
OpenStreetMaps is considerably more customizable, has much better hiking trail data, and doesn't hide train stations and street names when you zoom/pan. Google Maps has become awful in the last few years.
It has pretty clunky point of interest search. The main thing Google Maps does for me right now is "search for destination that I know exists, but whose exact address I don't have on hand, then navigate there." The entire flow when performing that task is quite polished. So far, I haven't found an OSM app that comes anywhere close to being as usable. Organic Maps gets close, but the spoken navigation is pretty bad.
OpenStreetMaps doesn't have aerial photo views, nor does it have street view. Those two let me go to almost any part of the world and see what it looks like, what the streets and houses are like in reality instead of just their marketing brochure photos.
Because they show ads to people. Do you think they should stop collecting your data just because you block their ads? I don't see why that would make any sense, they have no reason to incentivize ad block use.
But that isn't a fair trade, you argued that your data is worth enough to them that you should be allowed to use their server resources without anything extra from you. But that isn't true, every user like you costs them much more money than they earn.
In such a situation where one part pays for the other parts benefits, you should expect the part that just loses out to try to end the trade. And that is what we see happening here, youtube tries to block you since youtube doesn't want you as a user, since you lose them money.
No, you argued that my data wasn't worth anything. I argued that if it wasn't they wouldn't desperately try and get all my credit, medical, schooling, and browsing history.
What they do is incredibly immoral and despicable. There is no opt-out (even if I pay them money). Even if I never use their services they still try to vacuum up all my data.
Me watching a few YouTube videos a week is a better deal for them than it is for me.
So why are they spying on me when I still pay them? Or are you going to still pretend that hasn't been brought up 3 times now? Or that there is no opt out for their other tracking?
> So why are they spying on me when I still pay them
Since you pay them you have an account and is logged in. They do use the data they have collected about you to serve you targeted videos even if they don't serve you targeted ads, they say that in their privacy policy document. Targeted videos are for your convenience.
If you don't want it to target videos to you you can disable all that data collection here, at least I can (Not sure if you can outside of EU):
So go and disable all that if you feel their video targeting isn't worth collecting your data, but there is no way for them to target videos without having any data about you.
I don't want targeted videos. I don't even want them to know I exist. Even if I never used YouTube, that is impossible.
Their tracking is all encompassing and invasive, even without a Google account. They are a menace to the world and it should be an obligation to block their ads. If Google disappeared tomorrow the world would be better off.
Sounds like the issue is completely different then from what you brought up in your original post. You just hate Google and want to hurt them as much as possible, so then it makes sense for you to block them and consume their resources as much as possible. Thanks, that explains your position much better, why didn't you just say that from the start instead of beating around the bush for so long?
Nothing I just said is inconsistent with what I posted earlier. I have no desire to hurt them, but I'm not going to pretend that anything I do to them is immoral or tips the scale from what they've stolen from me over the years
I'm not the OP but you describe exactly my point of view :)
Though I don't just hate Google but really all big tech. I even work in it but my salary doesn't buy my loyalty, just my time. Loyalty requires respect.
It's more complicated than that because of the network effect. Few people host their videos elsewhere.
Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules. Nobody asked them to kill their competitors. Besides, I'm not really concerned for them. It's not like they are struggling.
> It's more complicated than that because of the network effect. Few people host their videos elsewhere.
Yes, but these things are far from essential. Most of YouTube is entertainment, which is as fungible as it gets, and what isn't (for example repair tutorials) can usually be solved by buying repair guides or hiring professionals. There are alternatives. You might not like them, but they exist.
> Google did this to themselves and they are the one imposing everybody to play by their rules.
This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".
> Nobody asked them to kill their competitors.
YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.
> YouTube has competition in all of its areas. They might be the leader, but they are not the singular source.
This is like saying Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on the PC market in the 90s because Apple had 5% of the market. They only feel comfortable designing serious limitations in MV3 because chrome owns 90% of the browser landscape.
> This is really peak absurdity. "Google made me use their service for free".
This is not absurd, they got to where they wanted through massive investor led subsidies and buying out their admittedly better competitor (remember google video?) What they performed on the on-demand video market was a form of predatory dumping, and when all the competition was gone they used that position as well as other positions to extract "value" and cash out.
Only if we ignore facts. Chrome only has a 64% market share, not 90%. Nobody has ever dominated a consumer tech market in the same way that Microsoft dominated the 90s.
On top of that, YouTube is only one choice of many for user created videos. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all top 20 sites that host user created videos. A number of YouTube creators mirror their content to Nebula and other creator platforms. Twitch is yet another alternative and is likely more popular than YouTube’s live feature.
We also have to count every streaming video service from the legacy media companies and Netflix/Amazon/Apple as competition as well.
In the 90s you couldn’t complete basic computing tasks without Internet Explorer and Office. Even while fully admitting to YouTube’s relative dominance of its niche, the situation is not the same.
> Only if we ignore facts. Chrome only has a 64% market share, not 90%. Nobody has ever dominated a consumer tech market in the same way that Microsoft dominated the 90s.
I think that browser market share is just one facet of the power Chrome holds over the web. Open source development, w3c membership and committee assignments, leadership in the direction the web takes, should also be considered alongside how much Chrome is being used directly.
> On top of that, YouTube is only one choice of many for user created videos. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all top 20 sites that host user created videos.
These are primarily social media products, it's not easy or intended to use these services in the same way as you would use Youtube. Video is a "Feature".
> In the 90s you couldn’t complete basic computing tasks without Internet Explorer and Office. Even while fully admitting to YouTube’s relative dominance of its niche, the situation is not the same.
I think it's the spectre of this past that people recognize as being the inevitable conclusion of the enshittification process, which is why the alarm bells are sounding now.
While I feel like your arguments are absolutely sound in isolation, I personally don't know "how much dominance is too much dominance?" considering the stakes, and I would certainly rather be cautious. That said, what sort of act do you think is a "bridge too far" for Google to implement?
I have no sympathy for a company that operated at a loss for enough years to price out competitors to the point it was the only real game in town.
You kill competitors and now want to dictate the price (including attention) everyone pays to see user-generated content? Yeah no.
Got zero sympathy. None. You do not command my attention - a resource I am less and less willing to pay with these days.
If that results in YouTube becoming unsustainable and collapsing and something more sustainable emerging charging a price consumers are willing to pay? Well then that sounds acceptable.
If you went to the site and continued to use it, you consented. That’s how EULAs work.
Your consent was given by the fact that you directed your browser to interact with the service continually, if that’s something that you did.
You can’t say you didn’t consent to be searched if you walked into an airport. You can’t say you didn’t consent to be splashed with water if you got on the log flume ride. Your own ignorance or disagreement with the fact that you can get searched at an airport or wet on a lot flume ride isn’t really an excuse.
Comparison to real world situations when the trigger is physical presence are not a good example exactly because they require physical presence, something unachievable in the virtual world of software and internet.
