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Comment by unclenoriega | Hacker News Reader

So if I block the ads, I guess that makes us even.

No, it pits the entire relationship in your favor since they now don't receive anything of value from you while you still receive their service.

A trade can't be fair when only one part benefits. If you feel their services are worth nothing then stop using them.

I'm working on that. The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.

Anyway, the value they receive is incidental: if I like content, I'll tell my friends about it. Not all of my friends dislike ads. I "market" the content via word of mouth. The content markets the subscriptions. Or the ads. Either one.

If I stop watching the content entirely (due to it becoming harder to discover) then fewer of my friends know about it. So it's not quite as black and white as you want it to be. The "grifting" population helps content to spread to the paying population.

> The hardest one to cut out is Google Maps, which doesn't have an ad free option.

OpenStreetMaps is considerably more customizable, has much better hiking trail data, and doesn't hide train stations and street names when you zoom/pan. Google Maps has become awful in the last few years.

OpenStreetMaps doesn't have aerial photo views, nor does it have street view. Those two let me go to almost any part of the world and see what it looks like, what the streets and houses are like in reality instead of just their marketing brochure photos.

I love OSMAnd for hiking, but it's never going to replace Google reviews, which are invaluable when traveling.

It has pretty clunky point of interest search. The main thing Google Maps does for me right now is "search for destination that I know exists, but whose exact address I don't have on hand, then navigate there." The entire flow when performing that task is quite polished. So far, I haven't found an OSM app that comes anywhere close to being as usable. Organic Maps gets close, but the spoken navigation is pretty bad.

I don't know what fantasy realm you live in where people are "trading" with Google when they watch a YouTube video. No such thing happens. No money changes hands, there is no transaction.

What does happen, is I make a request, and Google sends some bits to me over the Internet for free, and then those bits are sitting on my PC, and my PC is my property. I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it. If I want to transform the bits in some way, render video from some of them and not from others, all on my PC in my own home, then I can. With a few exceptions, courts have upheld that general right. Ad blocking isn't illegal, circumventing their anti-ad blocking isn't illegal, and it doesn't interfere with a "trade" because there wasn't one, Google just sends some bits for free to anyone who asks the right way.

Now Google can of course choose to refuse service to me for any reason they want. They can make their anti-ad blocking more sophisticated. That's fine, I'll use a competitor in that case, and we need to make sure the government enforces the antitrust laws on the books so that there's more competition against Google anyway. Whether YouTube is a criminal monopoly or not is currently up for debate, probably the answer is yes.

At any rate your understanding of the relationship is legally and morally flawed. You claim there is a trade between me and a probably criminal organization, where in fact there is none. On the other hand my right to control my property is one of the most fundamental rights out there. You better believe Google feels that way about their property and spends billions to protect/expand their own property rights!

So I am confused as to why you want Google to have property rights, but not the rest of us.

But hey, "You will own nothing and be happy," right? We're all really just renting our hardware I guess? It's 2023 and the concept of us little peons owning and controlling anything is obsolete, just do what Master says right?

BTW, FWIW my property rights are inalienable. I possess these rights because I was born a human, yes they are also upheld in the US Constitution, UN Declaration on Human rights etc. While government has mostly upheld them they don't come from government, they come from us being born human, so even if a government said what I was doing was illegal, it would be moral to ignore that government, resist and do it anyway. What's crazy to me is that people seem to be OK with handwaving away a basic human right just so that a corporation can make more profit off of entertainment content.

> I have the right to do whatever I want with my property and the bits on it

That is false. You might think that you should have that right, but you don't.

Come and take it

By your logic, because you own your hardware and can do whatever you want with it, you should be allowed to hack into other computers. After all, it's just pressing keys on a keyboard you own and sending bits from a computer you own?

Your incredibly reductionist take does not consider the fact that you exist in an ecosystem of relationships and economics.

That’s not what he’s saying. The statement is that he’s free to manipulate his computer as his property and since all the data that resides on it. There are exceptions to this, namely when it comes to infringing on the rights of others, but with the case of client side data the argument stands true.

The flaw in your thinking comes from not knowing that one can acknowledge property rights without the notion that anything can be done with their property. A baseball bat may be mine but it doesn’t mean I have the right to hit someone else’s property with it. I can, however, paint, carve, or otherwise destroy my bat without serious consequence.

Nope. Wrong. That other system is someone else's property. You don't have the right to vandalize someone else's property, ergo, breaking into another system over the network and causing damage to it is illegal.

Property laws are just as relevant to computer systems as they are to anything else.

Won't someone think of the trillion dollar corporations?

55% of that goes to the content creators. Most videos you watch at youtube wouldn't exist without people watching those ads.

How generous, with a conflict of interest on who decides the split. Good, most is garbage. One reason I use it rarely.

55%? You mean Google shared the metadata and the resulting profile it build of you across the web 55% with the creator?

Obviously not. They give a pittance of what they make with a single ad while continuing to use the data they acquire for as long as they want without you having any say in the matter. They simply steal this "useless" data and make billions year over year.

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