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Re:YouTube currently testing 5 to 10 unskippable ads before ... by marssaxman on Thursday September 15, 2022 @08:57AM (#32851174)
Your analogy fails because digital goods are non-rivalrous. Were I to shoplift a video from Walmart, they would no longer possess the video; my gain would be their loss. Obviously this is not true in the digital domain, so moral reasoning about physical stores is unhelpful.

What I receive, when I visit YouTube, is a list of links: invitations to stream certain videos. Google hopes that I will choose to accept all of its offers, since some of the videos are paid advertisements: but it's my computer, and my network connection, and I can do what I wish. Google cannot obligate me to receive any of its videos, any more than I can force Google to supply anything its servers don't want to share; the streaming operation must be mutually agreed.

As it happens, I do not care to spend my time or my bandwidth streaming the ads Google offers me, and I have therefore configured my browser, which runs on my computer, which I own, to act in accordance with my preferences. If Google does not like this arrangement, they are free to change it; nobody is forcing them to supply me with video content.

Re:YouTube currently testing 5 to 10 unskippable ads before ... by endisneigh on Thursday September 15, 2022 @04:42PM (#32858171)
Again this argument that digital goods are worthless. Google doesn’t hope anything - Google places ads, and people use technology means to get through.