They are giving things away for free with ads attached to them. People who don't like advertisements are removing them without looking at them. They are retaliating by trying to force them to look at the ads or to otherwise mess with them getting the free items in a timely manner in the first place. Well within their rights, I guess, but it still seems like they are throwing a tantrum to me.
> Well within their rights, I guess, but it still seems like they are throwing a tantrum to me.
I still don't see how it has anything to do with a tantrum. A tantrum is someone yelling and screaming because they aren't getting what they want. This is Google getting exactly what it wants, and I don't see any yelling and screaming.
It's just quietly asserting its rights to block adblockers.
Does google really have the right to block my control over what is shown or not shown on my computer? They may have the ability to do so, but that is not necessarily equivalent to a right.
For example, what if I had a robot that detected when an ad was being played on youtube, and automatically turned off my monitor and headphones momentarily, turning them back on once the ad was over. Would that violate google's "rights"?
> Does google really have the right to block my control over what is shown or not shown on my computer?
In general? Of course not.
On a webpage they serve to you? Of course they have the right to, to the extent JavaScript makes it possible. What possible legal basis could there be for them not to have that right? With limited exceptions, they have the right to do wherever they want with their webpage code. And there is no legal exception against blocking adblockers.
You didn't answer my hypothetical. Do they have the right to ensure that I am looking at their ads?
I don't see how they could, I can always look away. In that case, what is the effective difference between that and ad blockers that control what code/images run/display on my computer?
> They are giving things away for free with ads attached to them.
The are not "giving things away": they have terms of service. The agreement is: pay for premium or watch the ads. (This way they can pay their bills (including employee salaries and the creators that make the content).)
I am going to a publicly available web page, that they provide for the purpose of consuming their content, using standard protocols. I'm just filtering some of it out on my end on the computer I own and control. I don't see anything wrong with this, no matter what BS they might try to claim in their TOS.
No, that's not the textual or social contract for how advertising works. If a company starts giving away pizza but stacking tomes of ad flyers on top, it's ok to take those ads, dump them in the garbage, and eat the pizza. That's how advertising has worked on the internet for decades: "yes this content is free, pay no mind to these ads over here." Just cause you found "one weird trick" to get paid doesn't mean you own my time/attention.
Advertisers want more though, and inventory owners have drunk deep from the cash hose for so long that they want to normalize and enforce behavior that we the public have merely put-up-with till now. We as the audience are now being told that we OWE the pizza store our time and eyeballs; throwing away the ad flyer, why, that's STEALING! If you're a moral citizen, you'll sit there and read every line of copy, sing along with every jingle, watch every dancing mascot, otherwise you're a thief. We keep this up, and closing your eyes will soon be a crime.
Bad metaphor. No one is stealing anything from YouTube. Meanwhile a tantrum is a display of socially unacceptable behavior because you don’t like something.
How is blocking adblockers "socially unacceptable behavior"?
It might frustrate you personally -- the same way it might frustrate you to have to pay money to see a movie at a movie theater -- but I don't see what isn't acceptable about it socially.
bandwidth and hosting have associated costs. unlike piracy, which is just creating copies, this is using Google’s electricity to provide you a service without giving anything in return.
Google is always free to stop serving me anything at all if they choose to.
However, once they serve me something and it’s received by my user agent, I will use that user agent however I see fit to parse and display (or not display) that content.
I’ll rephrase my position: Google is free to ban my IP, require a payment before serving me videos, or whatever else they feel is appropriate to stop me from using their electricity without being compensated appropriately. But if they serve me a page containing a video, I have every right to instruct the software on my device to render that video however I see fit. This in no way is morally or legally comparable to stealing, theft, fraud, or whatever other words people are throwing around.
It is a tantrum in a way that a store with a lot of cash, that was giving out free clothes until all other clothes went bankrupt, and then raised the prices and hired a security guard, and the security guard could not stop all those people that were used to get the stuff free kind of tantrum!
However, me not buying something is quite obviously not equivalent to theft.
Besides, I only watch youtube ad-free. If this becomes impossible I will simply stop watching youtube, so, I don't think this strategy will have much effect on me either, at least within the context of youtube.
And they respond in the most predictable way: enshittifying the experience more and more so that more users will employ adblockers or leave. Nobody needed adblockers when ads weren't abusive, it took years for them to become as such so that someone created the first adblocker. There is a line separating ads that are acceptable if not interesting when unobtrusive and carefully targeted, from the load of crap they shovel at our face. Unfortunately that's how the system is built: not just making profits but maximizing them, which can't scale indefinitely, and the ever growing advertising that ruins both platforms and content value is just another warning that this system is broken from its roots.
