That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google).

Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.

Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs.

And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.

Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.