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Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 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.

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.

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