It seems to me that all of google's most successful services (search, youtube, gmail and gsuite, maps/earth, android) are next to impossible to monetize profitably and have significant utility to the general public. It feels like these are services that governments should be building and funding themselves.

Youtube specifically has a plethora of useful information made by normal people. You can find hundreds of thousands of videos, in most languages, about doing most basic and complex repairs for almost any model of car made in the last few decades, for example. It is essentially a giant public library.

I trust (with regards to privacy, censorship and bias) governments even less than Google to be honest.

Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

It is deeper that that, corporations literally are governments. When you form a corporation you are creating the government that your organization will now operate under. usually this will require a license from whatever larger governmental structure you find yourself in.

Sometimes this is a publicly tradable for profit endeavor, sometimes it is private or perhaps non-profit(all profits have to be distributed back into the corporation), or even an actual public corporation(often called a town or a city,

That is insane. No corporation has the ability to incarcerate you or kill you. No corporation can round up your family.

What, precisely, is the “threat” that Google presents that does not rely on a government to be the muscle. Are they going to cancel your Gmail account? Cut you off from YouTube?

Surely if they actually are as powerful and dangerous as you think they are you wouldn’t use their stuff at all. But then I guess they wouldn’t be all that powerful if you could just stop using them…

(Shrug) Insane, whatever. All I know is, when I call the IRS, I can get a human on the phone who actively wants to help.

Try that with Google, PayPal, Amazon, Apple, or any number of other companies when an error they've made but refuse to even explain, much less fix, threatens to wreck your livelihood.

To redress grievances with my government, I don't need to make the front page of HN or go viral on Twitter. We don't go a week around here without another front-page lamentation to appeal for noblesse oblige from one of these intentionally-faceless megacorps. That's not how you should have to deal with a company you're doing business with... but it is how you deal with a dictator who leaves you no other choice.

"megacorps have bad customer support" is a wildly different assertion than "megacorps are indistinguishable from government"

Ask the next person who comes on here begging for someone to unlock their account or restore their data so that they can make payroll.

There is a really simple flow chart to figure this out:

"Does entity X have a monopoly on violence?" If yes, they are a government. If no, they are not.

Whether X is nice or mean, important or unimportant, is irrelevant.

That's simple in countries without a Second Amendment, or that don't recognize self-defense as a fundamental human right, but it's not simple in this one.

I've been using premium for almost a decade now, since before it was rebranded from YouTube red. I'll let you know when it's safe to remove your tinfoil hat.

Oh and I'll be downloading my videos for offline viewing and listening to ad free unrestricted music as well.

So am I, sans the paying part.

Enjoy the tiny hole in your wallet? Weird flex. I enjoy the same benefits using uBlock origin and yt-dl. And it didn't take any tinfoil :)

Thank you for reminding me that yt-dlp also works with youtube music (didn't think of that). I just tried to list all the available formats of a song there:

    ID  EXT   RESOLUTION FPS CH │   FILESIZE  TBR PROTO │ VCODEC         VBR ACODEC      ABR ASR MORE INFO
    ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    233 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
    234 mp4   audio only        │                 m3u8  │ audio only         unknown             Default
    599 m4a   audio only      2 │    1.05MiB  31k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.5   31k 22k ultralow, m4a_dash
    600 webm  audio only      2 │    1.27MiB  37k https │ audio only         opus        37k 48k ultralow, webm_dash
    139 m4a   audio only      2 │    1.67MiB  49k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.5   49k 22k low, m4a_dash
    249 webm  audio only      2 │    1.86MiB  55k https │ audio only         opus        55k 48k low, webm_dash
    250 webm  audio only      2 │    2.44MiB  71k https │ audio only         opus        71k 48k low, webm_dash
    140 m4a   audio only      2 │    4.42MiB 130k https │ audio only         mp4a.40.2  130k 44k medium, m4a_dash
    251 webm  audio only      2 │    4.71MiB 138k https │ audio only         opus       138k 48k medium, webm_dash

Hm ... no mp3 (my car accepts mp3 only) and the bit rate is not very high. Is youtube music that bad?

> no mp3 (my car accepts mp3 only)

Both AAC and Opus fix some of MP3's inherent design problems (like imperfect handling of short sharp transients no matter how much bitrate you throw at it), so the only reason to continue using MP3 is for compatibility with old devices.

Since downloads aren't an official part of Youtube's offering, they don't have to care about old offline-only hardware players only supporting MP3, either and anything that's modern enough to still support either a Youtube app or the website will also support either AAC or Opus.

> the bit rate is not very high

There's also a high bitrate available, but only for subscribers.

Tell me, do you casually click 15-20 videos on your phone while You're taxing before takeoff to be entertained for the whole flight? Do you use a media player that lets you turn off the screen but continue to listen to your just released yt podcast while you work out? Do you watch live feeds on your phone without ads? Or do you run a yt-dl scripts from the CL 3-4 times per year to farm w comments?

I use NewPipe for all of those use cases. No ads, playback while screen is off, queue up and download videos, watch live streams, etc.

Sorry, was that supposed to be a gotcha?

It's funny that all the counterarguments here depend on things staying exactly the same forever.

But the only reason to pay for Premium is not to see ads, so that wouldn't work.

Not seeing ads is a benefit of the service. Paying for premium is to support the video makers and, yes, the service itself.

Paying for things you use is how you signal you like the product. The insane contortions people resort to in order to justify piracy boggles my mind. You either pay by watching ads or you pay the premium price. No one is entitled to YouTube. YouTube has to be paid for in order for it to exist and the creators to make stuff. That is the reason to pay for premium.

Or you can do what I do and support the creators on patreon and continue to use adblock on YouTube. That way you can consume content without feeling guilty and not support Google's monopoly at the same time.

For now.