this is essentially a rehash of the "what constitutes unauthorized access to unsecured resources?" debate. my personal opinion is that access cannot be unauthorized when the authN/authZ mechanism does not exist at all. others may disagree.
Youtube's Terms of Service[0] specifically say:
```
The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:
...
2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;
```
It's not a matter of "disagreeing" on what is allowed or not. If you don't agree with the ToS, you're free to not use the service. Let's not fool ourselves here.
Let's not fool ourselves here
Surely, some ToS are poorly written. Still, the owners of the service decided that those were the rules they want to play by. If they go against some law in a certain country, I'm sure a court would invalidate them in specific cases. Do you have reason to believe Youtube's ToS is unethical or shouldn't carry moral weight (specially the #2 paragraph I quoted)?
> But the majority of companies (web or otherwise) have excessive and dense TOS to which the average person cannot give informed consent to anyways.
YT's ToS seems pretty straightforward. Do you think the paragraph I quoted which talked about obstructing the service is written in excessive legalese? Was it unclear somehow?
In contract law, you have to sign up to the contract. One side can not just assert that the other side agreed to some terms unless they can show that this happened.
Now, i'm sure that if everyone did suddenly download Vanced and Youtube's largest profit funnel, mobile devices, ceased to exist, they could quickly whip up a system that does all it can to block video views without an attestation ticket vended when the ad server thinks you've watched the ad(s). At that point it'd be pretty clear cut that watching without any sort of indirect or direct payment is not allowed.
Morally, if you really get that much value out of YouTube, you probably should be paying for Premium even if you use Vanced or newpipe, if just to resist YT's shorts feature or other features that don't improve the quality of the main video experience. Premium views payout much more money per view to content creators than any ad would, especially if you have otherwise never bought something by clicking or engaging with the ad.
1. The parent commenter seems to be quite candid and sincere, so I don't think the word disingenuous applies here.
2. YouTube has decided NOT to obligate all users to view ads in order to retrieve content from their servers. The public needs to accept NO Terms of Service to curl a video down from their servers.
3. There is no such "implied arrangement" when it comes to YouTube's servers which YouTube provides to the public. Yes, some such arrangement is clear when using youtube.com or the official YouTube application. That distinction is critical here.
Also as some side-commentary from a utilitarian perspective, since this discussion seems to have a distinct moral slant. If one opts to view YouTube with ads – instead of without them – is that action increasing or decreasing the net human well-being in the world? Given that no laws are broken and no crime has occurred, this seems to be the last remaining question we must answer.
And it seems quite clear to me that the alternate world where video-bandwidth is NOT purchased with human attention spent on advertisements seems to be, in nearly all ways, an improvement on what we have today.
Those strong words would need a real, clear contract between google and the user.
"We serve you a video and we track everything you do, allmost wherever you go online"
I haven't seen it spelled out by google like this and surely this is genral knowledge around here, but most people still don't have a clue about the general concept.
In either case, even if the ads are blocked, you still pay with your data, by being tracked what you watch and when you watch it - and in combination with always online smartphone controlled by google - with whom you watch.
In other words, if it would be only about ads or no ads and just the service, I would agree. But this is not the case, so I also have zero question about moral with this one. It is more about self defense of your attention.
So yes, we need other payment models than advertisement. But I doubt this can come from google, no matter how much I would pay them, for a single service.
YouTube Premium
I don't like the ads either, so I pay for YT Premium. I want to support the creators that I watch, and I don't want to suffer ads.
That I get YT music included and save on not having to subscribe to Spotify is a little bonus.
The transactional relationship morality being posited is more appropriate for relatively equal parties, or for the stronger party to give the the weaker party. For the weaker parties to owe stringent obligations to the cosmically stronger party creates a positive feedback loop of oppression. You might reply, but that's how the economy works. You have now advanced one step in your understanding.
That's clearly not the case. A better model is that Google has tried to limit your options to "either do business with us or don't watch popular media", with only partial success because a lot of people don't like either option. I think the truth of this model is betrayed by the fact that Google has not (yet) embedded the ad in to the same video stream as the content. They have not really tried to out-block ublock because they'd rather you steal youtube videos than support a different platform.
And they are choosing, voluntarily, to serve you videos unbundled from advertisements.
Regardless, there is a loss, and they'll respond to it when it becomes significant enough.
edit: uBlock Origin has over 10,000,000 users, according to the chrome web store. I can only imagine something will change soon, or there's some serious technical debt holding things back.
Yes, just like it's less of a monetary loss for you to install an ad blocker than subscribe to YouTube Premium!
Yet Google, like Microsoft back in the day when piracy of Windows was rampant, would rather adblock users still use their site. They have the means to make it close-to impossible to watch YouTube with an adblocker, but they chose not to.
Clearly they believe that adblock users still provide net-positive value to them.
Clearly they believe that shoplifters still provide net-positive value to them.
Which is obviously bs, just because they don't stop you from doing it doesn't make it a net positive from them. It could just as likely mean that the time and effort to stop it is more expensive than the losses they would incur.
They are offering you a service with two options to pay for the service. Either by watching ads or paying a subscription. You are choosing to consume the content without paying.
What if the delivered content is subpar?
I have watched ads (ie paid with my attention).
How do I get my money back?
That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction: You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website. The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you.
Now obviously the financial value involved is de minimis in the case of a YouTube video, but nevertheless you're taking service and declining the payment.
The actual offense is so vanishingly small that they basically don't care enough to do anything about it, but let's be honest about what's really happening here. They're not just sending ads to you for no reason without your consent.