I fail to understand the economics behind this. If google cant show ads, and people dont want to pay for a subscription, how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running? It’s not a public service, they have to monetise somehow.
First and foremost is the issue of companies trying to dictate what you are allowed to do on your own computer. If Google sends you the data, who are they to say how your computer decides to interpret it? What's next? Mandatory camera access so they can monitor your living room to make sure "unauthorized" people aren't watching? They would if they could get away with it.
Two is the business model of offering a free, useful service until people are hooked and then squeezing people for money. It's dishonest, it's extortion. Especially something like YouTube where the site itself is meaningless without the content creators who all largely started out as volunteers. It's the digital equivalent of a time-share sales pitch. Trap your audience. It perverts the normal operation of markets because everyone made decisions to use YouTube based on false economics, and now they are such a behemoth that moving to other platforms is not realistic for many. Had they not been allowed to do that, then the competitive landscape would look much different.
The bad faith hysterics of some of the people who block ads is really something to behold.
Which is a completely arbitrary restriction, thus people were working around it by splitting their video in parts?
It isn't any cheaper to serve 10 short video files instead of 1 long video file (in fact it might be more expensive since a good codec would make 1 video file smaller in size than its equivalent separated into 10 discrete files).
What they cannot do is access your device without your consent. So scanning for adblock extensions is illegal in Europe if you didn't ask permission for it.
Google wants to have their cake and eat it too by having a "free" platform but also controlling exactly how people view it in their browser. If you want to actually control content you need to have a real paywall. There are ways they could implement ads that would not be blockable (with a logged in user), but they don't want to do that for some reason.
The very same way that they’ve been doing so far. YouTube/Google/Alphabet is definitely not short on cash, so that means that even with ad blocking they’re doing just fine.
Or maybe more likely, consume content from unfriendly countries who will simply ignore the regulation, and force a continuous game of whack a mole with their domains.
If Europe takes this stance, those competitors could also be allowed to mirror the content from foreign, non-GDPR-compliant companies, effectively giving them the best of both worlds?
Where would this domestic competitor even get the content from? Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?
But maybe the website can just (in combination with a universal micropayments system) charge a reasonable fee and that people will just pay it?
> Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?
That's another hypothesis. The EU could just rule that it's legal to copy content provided for free and then legally "steal" it from other platforms?
Why wouldn't those ads be blocked? And they cannot take countermeasures if they were held as illegal in this case. Not sure how that's an alternative.
>That's another hypothesis. The EU could just rule that it's legal to copy content provided for free and then legally "steal" it from other platforms?
Won't that kill EU content creators more than other ones, because non-English EU based content is mostly created and consumed within the EU.