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Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU
(eupolicy.social)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he's making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they're doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn't stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he's repeatedly flaunting credentials that don't change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
Ah yeah the kind of hullabaloo that makes everyone accept cookies on every single website ;)
shoutout to Consent-O-Matic! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
Yay for ublocks annoyance pop up blocker. No more cookie pop ups
You're missing the point/s
How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I'd guess the alternative is no more YouTube.
Why is everyone so worked up about a huge company wanting to earn even more money, we know this is how it works, and we always knew this was coming. You tried to cheat the system and they've had enough.
I think it's a question of drawing a line between "commercial right" and "public good".
Mathematical theorems automatically come under public good (because apparently they count as discoveries, which is nonsense - they are constructions), but an artist's sketch comes under commercial right.
YouTube as a platform is so ubiquitously large, I suspect a lot of people consider it a public good rather than a commercial right. Given there is a large body of educational content, as well as some essential lifesaving content, there is an argument to be made for it. Indeed, even the creative content deserves a platform.
A company that harvests the data of billions, has sold that data without permission for decades, and evades tax like a champion certainly owes a debt of public good.
The actions of Google are not those of a company "seeking their due", for their due has long since been harvested by their monopolisation of searches, their walked garden appstore, and their use of our data to train their paid AI product.
A public good? Like roads, firefighters, etc? You want the government to pay for your Youtube Premium subscription?
Less snarky, if you're arguing that Youtube has earned a special legal status, a natural consequence is that Google gets to play by a different rulebook from all other competitors. That's quite a dangerous direction to take.
Your snark was actually closer to the mark than you think.
Let's say YouTube vanished overnight, what would the impact be? Sarcasm might suggest "we'd all be more productive" but let's take a deeper look.
A lot of free courses (or parts thereof) would vanish. (A key resource for poorer learners)
Most modern tech repair guides would be gone (no machine breakdowns, no guides on fixing errors on old hardware)
A lot of people's voices would be silenced (YouTube is an awful platform, but for some people it's one of the only ones they have)
Seems to me, it would do a lot of public harm. Probably more harm than removing a freeway or closing a fire station.
As for letting Google "play by a different rulebook", it does so already. The OP has indicated that they're undertaking an action in an illegal way, and yet no-one much cares to stop them. Yes, they could do the same thing via legal channels, but that's rather like suggesting there is no difference between threats of violence vs taking someone to court when trying to collect money.
Would you grant an insurance company similar legal indemnity? How would you feel about your local barber peeking in your window and selling what they see? Google has long played by a different rulebook, and thus different expectations are held.
Honestly if I were a politician I would support legislation restricting permanent bans from major websites from being given out willy-nilly because too many of them are ubiquitous enough to qualify as a public good.
Err, going through threads of conversations on both reddit and lemmy regarding YouTube, one would assume ad free access is the norm and Google even daring to offer Youtube Premium is a bad thing.
I feel offering Youtube Premium while still tracking the users online movement is indeed a bad thing.
I get what you are saying, but you could argue that google is pretty much a monopoly at this point, using their power trying to extract money from customers they could never do if their was any real competition with a similar number of channels and customers.
I think most users see google/youtube as a "the internet", or a utility as important as power, water and heat. And don't forget that google already requires users to "pay" for their services with data and ads in other services (maps, search, mail) as well.
Nope, but it is legally required to ask for permission to look into my device for data that it does not need to provide the serice.
Of course Google could make money, it just need to make them without violating the laws.
Nope, the point is that, at the moment, Google seems to look where it should not look to know if a user has an adblocker and they don't ask for permission.
Let put it in another way: Google need to have my permission to look into my device.
Which is fine as long as Google can decide that I am using an adblocker without violating any law, which is pretty hard.
Of course Google could decide that it is better to leave EU and it law that protect the users, but is it a smart move from a company point of view ?
The guy really exudes “don’t you know who I am?” energy. Which is a shame since it detracts from the discussion.
It’s not even clear to me that the mechanism they’re using today is problematic. I don’t know what it is, but the author seems to think they do but aren’t sharing details beyond “trust me bro”. I agree that some kind of inspection-based detection might run afoul of the law, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. All you need to know is that the client is requesting videos without any of the ad requests making it through, which is entirely server-side.
I feel like they're eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you'll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won't be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
the reason they are not doing it is because the ads are personalized. So if they want to bake an ad onto a video they will end up with countless videos each on with their own unique ads which is not viable logistically. So they can only do it on-the-fly. But re-encoding each video on-the-fly for each user is also a nightmare logistically, if not impossible at all.
I don't think you'd need to re-encode the whole thing on the fly. More frigging the container data around, than the video/audio codec itself.
That way I could request some_pointless_video.mp4 and it sends me 95% the same thing as is already on their server, with adverts jammed into it at defined intervals.
They probably think they can win for now by messing with individual ad-blockers, but with 3rd party players becoming more popular, I can see that being a catch-all solution.
isn't this more or less what they're doing now? The difference is that the ads are coming from different server and have an overlay on top with a timer and a skip. As long as the ads are coming from a different server they will be detectable. Also as long as the ads have overlays they are also detectable. They would need to make the ads be served from the same server that serves the video and eliminate the overlays.
That's the difference. The ads are coming from somewhere else and displayed in a different way.
By injecting it into the stream, there's no way to detect that. To your player it would all look like it's coming from the same place. Instead of a ten minute video and a couple of 20 second ads, it's now just 11 minutes of video.
Don't they have standardized resolutions and the file broken into hundreds/thousands of parts anyways? Couldn't they just add in ads to some of those parts in those same resolutions?
e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over_HTTP
isn't this more or less what they're doing now? The difference is that the ads are coming from different server and have an overlay on top with a timer and a skip. As long as the ads are coming from a different server they will be detectable. Also as long as the ads have overlays they are also detectable. They would need to make the ads be served from the same server that serves the video and eliminate the overlays.
We could build a public database (like SponsorBlock) of known ad video slices and detect them that way.
There will always be a way to detect and block ads.
I'm not worried.
Ha ha no. Google needs you more than you need google.
> but but but the ads moneh
If google made so much money from ads, they wouldn't care if you watched it at all. They want your consumerist data and they can't get it with adblock.
> but but but muh creators
Most major creators have complained about google shafting them with schizo rules about monetization. The biggers ones have started to sell merch and use other platforms as insurance. You watching those ads gives google more benefits than the creators.
Youtube is NOT essential. You can live without youtube. Simply follow the creators you like on other platforms. If you're a creator, time to diversify your platform. The iceberg is sighted and it's time to jump ship.
Google DOES make money from ads. A metric tuckton of it. Why the fuck else would they need your data other than to serve better ads???
Won't cost them anything near weeks of dev time. They can just write it into their terms of service and prompt you to re-accept those next time you access the site.
Afaik you can't bypass laws and regulations with ToS
Definetly not if you are not registered. And likely if you are not logged in. This is EU, not US.
They could easily put a “consent” requirement to access