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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> I don't feel any obligation to allow Google to use my own device and internet connection to serve me ad content that I don't wish to see.

That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction: You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website. The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.

Now obviously the financial value involved is de minimis in the case of a YouTube video, but nevertheless you're taking service and declining the payment.

The actual offense is so vanishingly small that they basically don't care enough to do anything about it, but let's be honest about what's really happening here. They're not just sending ads to you for no reason without your consent.

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I don't know what to tell you other than I simply don't agree. at a high level, the YouTube website is a wrapper for endpoints that serve ads and endpoints that serve content. nowhere in the flow of clicking a video from the homepage and watching it does there appear any language saying that I need to hit both sets of endpoints to use the service at all. they merely make it inconvenient not to do so.

this is essentially a rehash of the "what constitutes unauthorized access to unsecured resources?" debate. my personal opinion is that access cannot be unauthorized when the authN/authZ mechanism does not exist at all. others may disagree.

I too use an ad blocker, download torrents etc. but I really dislike when we ("tech savvy people") suddenly feign to ignore the rules of society and start to use the same arguments as line cutters, shoplifters, or any non-disabled who park on a disabled spot. This is just misbehaving guys, stop trying to find a silly defense.

> this is essentially a rehash of the "what constitutes unauthorized access to unsecured resources?" debate

Youtube's Terms of Service[0] specifically say:

```

The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:

...

2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;

```

It's not a matter of "disagreeing" on what is allowed or not. If you don't agree with the ToS, you're free to not use the service. Let's not fool ourselves here.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

Since at no point in time am I forced to read nor agree to those terms, I don't think they can be used as an argument.

First time you go to YouTube (at least in Europe), it shows a cookie banner containing a link to the ToS. (Try it from a private mode browser window.)

You're allowed to be ignorant of trespassing statutes too. But you can still be kicked out of someone's business.

That's quite different. In criminal law, ignorance of the law is explicitly not a defence.

In contract law, you have to sign up to the contract. One side can not just assert that the other side agreed to some terms unless they can show that this happened.

Browserwrap agreements don't require the user to click on anything though.

Irrespective of the larger argument; I mean many TOS are unethical and/or shouldn't carry moral weight. If it was one company sure, don't use it. But the majority of companies (web or otherwise) have excessive and dense TOS to which the average person cannot give informed consent to anyways.

Let's not fool ourselves here

> I mean many TOS are unethical and/or shouldn't carry moral weight

Surely, some ToS are poorly written. Still, the owners of the service decided that those were the rules they want to play by. If they go against some law in a certain country, I'm sure a court would invalidate them in specific cases. Do you have reason to believe Youtube's ToS is unethical or shouldn't carry moral weight (specially the #2 paragraph I quoted)?

> But the majority of companies (web or otherwise) have excessive and dense TOS to which the average person cannot give informed consent to anyways.

YT's ToS seems pretty straightforward. Do you think the paragraph I quoted which talked about obstructing the service is written in excessive legalese? Was it unclear somehow?

I agree: In a way (but not legally), YouTube does basically give you the ability to watch without ads. The reason this is generally allowed is because Google knows that the perceived value of keeping their stranglehold of viewers allows them to keep their monopoly on those viewers' eyeballs, thus forcing creators to keep uploading their videos to YouTube (lest they upload to eg. Nebula and get 1/10000th the viewership). If they did do something extreme, they risk triggering some mass exodus from YouTube to other platforms; their monopoly on non-television video advertising would crumble overnight.

Now, i'm sure that if everyone did suddenly download Vanced and Youtube's largest profit funnel, mobile devices, ceased to exist, they could quickly whip up a system that does all it can to block video views without an attestation ticket vended when the ad server thinks you've watched the ad(s). At that point it'd be pretty clear cut that watching without any sort of indirect or direct payment is not allowed.

Morally, if you really get that much value out of YouTube, you probably should be paying for Premium even if you use Vanced or newpipe, if just to resist YT's shorts feature or other features that don't improve the quality of the main video experience. Premium views payout much more money per view to content creators than any ad would, especially if you have otherwise never bought something by clicking or engaging with the ad.

> That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction

1. The parent commenter seems to be quite candid and sincere, so I don't think the word disingenuous applies here.

2. YouTube has decided NOT to obligate all users to view ads in order to retrieve content from their servers. The public needs to accept NO Terms of Service to curl a video down from their servers.

3. There is no such "implied arrangement" when it comes to YouTube's servers which YouTube provides to the public. Yes, some such arrangement is clear when using youtube.com or the official YouTube application. That distinction is critical here.

Also as some side-commentary from a utilitarian perspective, since this discussion seems to have a distinct moral slant. If one opts to view YouTube with ads – instead of without them – is that action increasing or decreasing the net human well-being in the world? Given that no laws are broken and no crime has occurred, this seems to be the last remaining question we must answer.

And it seems quite clear to me that the alternate world where video-bandwidth is NOT purchased with human attention spent on advertisements seems to be, in nearly all ways, an improvement on what we have today.

"but nevertheless you're taking service and declining the payment"

Those strong words would need a real, clear contract between google and the user.

"We serve you a video and we track everything you do, allmost wherever you go online"

I haven't seen it spelled out by google like this and surely this is genral knowledge around here, but most people still don't have a clue about the general concept.

In either case, even if the ads are blocked, you still pay with your data, by being tracked what you watch and when you watch it - and in combination with always online smartphone controlled by google - with whom you watch.

In other words, if it would be only about ads or no ads and just the service, I would agree. But this is not the case, so I also have zero question about moral with this one. It is more about self defense of your attention.

So yes, we need other payment models than advertisement. But I doubt this can come from google, no matter how much I would pay them, for a single service.

> So yes, we need other payment models than advertisement. But I doubt this can come from google, no matter how much I would pay them, for a single service.

YouTube Premium

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you still being tracked by Google even when using YouTube Premium? So while you not get ads, you are still paying an additional cost that is your data which is used for ads elsewhere.

Those who pay for Premium are highly valuable ad targets by definition.

And for whatever it's worth, it hurts the person who uploads the video. YouTube represents a portion of my income, and it making less makes it harder to justify uploading videos.

I don't like the ads either, so I pay for YT Premium. I want to support the creators that I watch, and I don't want to suffer ads.

That I get YT music included and save on not having to subscribe to Spotify is a little bonus.

Google is so powerful they can basically mold their audience and is one of the most profitable companies in the world. I do not care if consumers want more control over their lives and do not wish to be propagandized by ads. Nor do I mind if they don't want to transfer more wealth to the fabulously wealthy.

The transactional relationship morality being posited is more appropriate for relatively equal parties, or for the stronger party to give the the weaker party. For the weaker parties to owe stringent obligations to the cosmically stronger party creates a positive feedback loop of oppression. You might reply, but that's how the economy works. You have now advanced one step in your understanding.

This might be the right model if web media were an ideal marketplace, with a variety of competing options to choose from.

That's clearly not the case. A better model is that Google has tried to limit your options to "either do business with us or don't watch popular media", with only partial success because a lot of people don't like either option. I think the truth of this model is betrayed by the fact that Google has not (yet) embedded the ad in to the same video stream as the content. They have not really tried to out-block ublock because they'd rather you steal youtube videos than support a different platform.

Isn't the reason simply that reencoding would cost more than the loss of revenue from blocking?

> You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website.

And they are choosing, voluntarily, to serve you videos unbundled from advertisements.

My assumption is that it's less of a monetary loss for them to serve the ads unbundled compared to putting the engineering resources behind bundling them. They, obviously, have the exact numbers readily available, and I assume the "money lost" lines will cross eventually.

Regardless, there is a loss, and they'll respond to it when it becomes significant enough.

edit: uBlock Origin has over 10,000,000 users, according to the chrome web store. I can only imagine something will change soon, or there's some serious technical debt holding things back.

> My assumption is that it's less of a monetary loss for them to serve the ads unbundled compared to putting the engineering resources behind bundling them.

Yes, just like it's less of a monetary loss for you to install an ad blocker than subscribe to YouTube Premium!

The difference is that an ad blocker results in a one way transfer of value, without compensation.

> That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction: You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website. The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.

Yet Google, like Microsoft back in the day when piracy of Windows was rampant, would rather adblock users still use their site. They have the means to make it close-to impossible to watch YouTube with an adblocker, but they chose not to.

Clearly they believe that adblock users still provide net-positive value to them.

Physical stores have the means to make it close-to impossible to shoplift goods from their store by investing in security, but they chose not to.

Clearly they believe that shoplifters still provide net-positive value to them.

Which is obviously bs, just because they don't stop you from doing it doesn't make it a net positive from them. It could just as likely mean that the time and effort to stop it is more expensive than the losses they would incur.

They are offering you a service with two options to pay for the service. Either by watching ads or paying a subscription. You are choosing to consume the content without paying.

I'm also paying them with my user data. They use this data to generate insights and make more products that make them more money. It's very easy to overlook how much you are paying through your user behaviour.

As long as Google put something on the web that can be accessed using standard HTTP calls, there’s no obligation on anyone’s side to use the way of consuming that is most convenient for Google. If Google want to control it, they can sell CDs, embed ads inside a video or similar. Or just get of the web. But using HTTP on the internet the way it’s intended to be used is totally ok.

> The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.

What if the delivered content is subpar?

I have watched ads (ie paid with my attention).

How do I get my money back?

No refunds. You can't demand a refund from a movie theater because you hated a movie, and you can't return a new game to Best Buy because you hated the game. I don't understand why you'd imply YouTube content comes with any "satisfaction guarantee."

A move or a game is a piece of art. A newsarticle can have objectively incorrect information, which makes it like a TV with broken pixels.

We have a lot of solutions for distribution of content. Because of youtube's stranglehold, content creators go there even if they're not monetizing for the exposure. I don't care about blocking youtube ads because they're an innovation stifling monopolist, and the amount the give back to creators is pretty garbage, while raking in stupid profits.

There is a third party involved here. As an advertiser I do not want my ads shown for someone that don't want to see them, that is wasted money. Isn't that fraud, telling your fans to click/watch the ads because you make money for each click/watch? Adblockers save me money and lets me reach more people that matter.

Is it truly voluntary when everything you want to watch is only available on youtube? there's no way for an individual to pay or do anything for an alternative option.

There is a way to pay as the parent mentions: YouTube premium.

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