The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else.

The solution you mentioned is valid too.

But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist.

If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).

Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine.

Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around.

Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.

Exactly. It’s amazing that ads-ers send bits regardless and expect them to be consumed as is, as if it was some fundamental law of nature to do so. Simply don’t send, wink. That wink makes them feel uneasy because it breaks that wonderful narrative of theirs. “If you don’t want to watch ads, just don’t visit”. Yeah, just paywall us then, come on, we’re all yours, signed in, vendor locked. I’m so ready to leave and delete the bookmark, what are you waiting for?

People are playing this cat-and-mouse game with YouTube specifically, where they’ll circumvent the desire to block them for not rendering ads. I think this is a bad thing for users to do. But I mostly think it should make the ad providers uncomfortable. Because they know that most people won’t play cat and mouse for their content. In any case other than YouTube, people would just move on.

They know it. We know they know it, because if they really didn’t want to send bits to ad-blockers, they’d copy the first step of the back-and-forth that Google did with YouTube, and those users would no longer be a problem.