This goes both ways though. If it's not theft to not watch the ads, it's not "anticompetitive" to not serve you the video if they think you're blocking ads. What "competition" are they even blocking? The competitors who are just waiting to jump in and do exascale video hosting for free, forever, to users who bring in no revenue?
Either accept the cat-and-mouse game, pay for YT premium, or stop using YouTube. Complaining that Google is somehow wronging you by not giving you the free video hosting you're entitled to is asinine.
The competition they are blocking are all the competitors they drove out of business by running youtube at a loss for ages. They're only now putting ads in videos, charging for not-doing-that, blocking ad blockers, and so on, now that they've driven all the competitors after business. Predatory pricing of this nature is a well know old anti-competitive tactic. The only slightly new wrinkle is that they're letting users pay with their time and attention instead of requiring them to pay with dollars.
They should not be allowed to profit from their anti-competitively acquired monopoly, even in ways that their competitors would have if they had not been driven out of business.
> to users who bring in no revenue?
Oh, sweet summer child, they already have been monetizing their users browsing behavior and selling it to advertisers. It's their main business
> Complaining that Google is somehow wronging you by not giving you the free video hosting you're entitled to is asinine.
Google are using our browsing and video watching data already. That's enough (and has been enough over many years) for them to monetize their service. What they are doing now with the attack on adblockers on Youtube is corporate greed as they simply want MORE monetization.
And what they are doing to adblockers in general with manifest v3 and Privacy Sandbox is simply anti-competitive practices.
> Either accept the cat-and-mouse game, pay for YT premium, or stop using YouTube.
And how about no? What's in to you? Working in Youtube and worried your boss can't buy his 5-th Tesla? Understand that there are some people not happy with the enshittification of the internet, and we want to fight for a better one.
> Why do you think that data is valuable?
If I am not logged in and I have "Do Not Track", it's illegal for them to track my usage for marketing purposes, let alone show me personalized ads.
The only way they are allowed to legally monetize data for marketing purposes is to find other users that don't have do-not-track + opted in for marketing targeting, and show the ads to them.
Additionally, they can (and do) utilize bulk usage data (from many people) by feeding it into their ecosystem. For example, a video about cats being more popular than another will pop up higher on the search rankings when somebody searches for "cat". User "labor"/interest moderates the content on the platform, which makes it more attractive, and increases the overall number and engagement of users. Out of those users there is some % that have opted in for marketing, and can be legally targeted by personalized ads.
Either accept the cat-and-mouse game, pay for YT premium, or stop using YouTube. Complaining that Google is somehow wronging you by not giving you the free video hosting you're entitled to is asinine.