Bittorrent would like to have a word.

I am in the same boat. They are providing a service. Ads suck so I pay for. The evil angle is tiring. If they are so evil why even use YouTube at all.

Because we’re addicted?

I’m serious, but philosophically, the onus is clearly on us to get rid of our addiction. But Youtube is a quasi-monopoly of random micro-conferences. Nebula and Vimeo aren’t on the same market. So basically we specifically like Youtube. But I’d never pay Google after what they did to James Damore.

If Costco decided they wanted to make a profit on their 1.50$ hot dogs and cranked the price up to 3$, they would lose a ton of goodwill and many of their loyal customers would be upset.

Google isn’t exactly struggling to make ends meet. They seem perfectly okay to be losing money on search. YouTube is no different.

The hot dogs are getting more and more noticeable as everything else there seems majorly overpriced. $10 for some half sandwich?

It's a tangent, but that $10 roast beef sandwich is gigantic. I was surprised when they rolled out such an expensive food court item, and so I bought it, and I couldn't finish it. I took half of it home to eat later. I am not a light eater.

Pizza is also cheap.

We don't want them to be losing money because that prevents competition since no one can compete with that. It's a monopolistic practice.

Then why did Youtube/Google start hosting videos for free? And continue to do so for so long, "unsustainably" ? That was the deal they offered, and that people bought into. Now that they've achieved the soft lock in of network effects, they want to completely alter the bargain. In the antitrust sense, this is called dumping.