Re:Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]
by amelius on Sunday October 24, 2021 @11:42AM
(#28978954)
Then consider the 1 second delay as an advertisement for consumer power. Google/YouTube annoys users with similar or even longer delays all the time. So I don't think you can see this as an "action against the user", unless you consider all non-user-tracking advertisements as an action against the user.
Also, the campaign can stop when Chrome and Firefox reach an equal user-base. So "the user losing freedom of choice of browser" is also not a strong argument.
Yes, it's sad that this seems necessary, but you can't fight corporate evilness with just goodwill. In a sense, this is somewhat similar to the paradox of tolerance [1].
Throttling based on user agent (Firefox, WebKit Safari, etc) would be a bad thing if you ran YouTube and wanted to encourage people to use Chrome - it would likewise be bad if you ran a website like HN.
Users have power when they have control - Google is taking that away, and that's why antitrust legislation makes sense. But users lose power when their choice of browser (in a market where there are only 2-3 choices) makes their web experience artificially worse.