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Even if you pay for YouTube premium you might still want to have adblocker on simply due to privacy concerns. Tracking is pervasive.
Infrastructure might not be free, but for many, many years these companies built their hegemonic position by pretending it was free. Now they pull the rug under people.
Tell me though, what alternatives there are for people who want to watch long form videos there are? Yes, you have nebula and a couple more; but YouTube is still king. In many cases watchers don't get to choose the platform. So yes, they could simply stop watching. But it's not an ideal situation and all because you don't agree with the way the platform earns money.
I think people should use adblocker. The way these platforms monetise our data is not something most of us chose, and the option to circumvent their practices is out there. It's a cat and mouse game, and we'll see who comes out on top.
I use adblockers and Youtube Premium. Youtube Premium doesn't care about adblockers.
But that's still not a great argument because Youtube as a first-party is still going to collect all of your data even with adblockers. All you are doing is impacting their ability to make money.
AdBlockPlus (ABP), famously has criteria for "Acceptable Ads" [2], which provide some commonsense criteria for what ads should be acceptable. Some discussion indicates that ABP is blocking many ads on YouTube [3]. QED It is not reasonable to assume Youtube is adhering to this reasonable guideline for ads.
And so, if ads can be harmful, and the platform ignores reasonable steps to address objections to advertising, all we're left with is forcing a behaviour that works for us.
[1]
Profiting from Hate: Platforms’ Ad Placement Problem
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/profiting-hate-platforms-...
[2] https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
[3] https://blog.adblockplus.org/blog/whats-happening-with-youtu...
Adblockers are a form of civil protest against that practice.
Maybe infra isn't free, but how much does the average person consume in terms of bandwidth compared to how much value Google gets out of their data?
... but if users start paying for the services they use, they reverse the business incentives. "If the product is free, you are the product"
> how much value Google gets out of their data
The value of your data is in serving you ads. If they don't serve you ads, you have no value to Youtube.
The reality is flipped: block all ads and tracking from your life and help others to do the same. Then companies like Google/Facebook that dump free services onto the market and make it impossible for ethical companies to exist in the space will have to start charging money.
And if you give them money, you are also the product, and also a sucker.
It was to get a lock in, isn't it? They could've easily offered a premium service even then.
The reason most people don't want to pay and want to use ad blockers is because that is what they promised.
You go back on your word, there's going to be consequences.
There was never any explicit or implicit promise of "everything for free, with no ads", and you using a technical measure to avoid the ads that have been there for almost two decades doesn't create a promise either. Like, if you shoplifted for a week and didn't get caught, do you feel entitled to never pay at the store again?
I hit a Google endpoint and it sends me data. Google has no control over what my browser does with that data, nor should it.
They do have the right to refuse to send me that data if they decide I'm doing something with it they don't like, such as blocking the ads. As arms races go, I like my odds.
It seems pretty clear the OP was saying that YouTube had no right to try to prevent adblocking, and that the reason was that since there was a time they didn't prevent adblocking, it created some kind of implicit promise to allow it for ever.
In that context, I think the analogy to shoplifting is pretty fair. I'm not saying that you're a thief. I'm sure you're not. I'm saying that you taking something for no compensation doesn't create an obligation for the target to continue allowing you to do continue taking it for free, forever.
I don't.
A fair analogy would be that just because a credit union had free donuts and coffee for the first six months it operated, doesn't oblige them to still offer that twenty years later.
Shoplifting is criminal behavior which someone might get away with, when YouTube was (briefly) giving out product without ads, gratis. Nor is it illegal to block ads, nor should it be illegal. Do I agree that it's weird to expect YouTube to still be ad-free just because it briefly was? Yeah, sure.
https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
For anyone that considers ads to be a legitimate form of "payment", consider whether you feel the same about a site running a background crypto miner without your explicit consent. If you find the crypto miner worse for some reason (my sense is most people seem to think that'd be wrong), note that the crypto miner is a much more direct form of payment that doesn't also spy on you and does not seek to manipulate you.
Also note that the same company that's running that expensive infrastructure pretty much completely controls the direction of the web, and could overnight make it so that almost everyone's browser has built-in torrent support and allows magnet links as a src for video tags. Or they can choose to have that not be true so that you must distribute media through expensive centralized platforms that only a multi-trillion dollar corporation like them could afford.