YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
Google's anti-ad scripts are breaking browsers and privacy plugins. It could get worse because Google controls the ad market, Chrome, and the extension store.
Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
Ya I'll never stop using ad blockers, the internet is essentially unusable without them. Mine still work on youtube but if the day comes that they don't I'll just stop using it. We need some competition here, things have gotten increasingly anticonsumer and the companies have gotten too comfortable doing and charging whatever they want
Antitrust laws are not enforced nearly as much as they should be, especially in tech.
Google only has power as we the people give it to them but using their services. Same with Reddit’s power and such. Not the people here as we have unfortunately unplugged, but admittedly, all the decentralized services have significantly less content and variety of content. We need more people to join us, but they seem happy to support the centralized services they hate.
The YouTube adblocker overlay and such doesn't work if you're in incognito mode. You're welcome.
Stop begging them, stop using them.
i jumped the google ecosystem a few years back seeing this coming..
i hear a lot of 'but i use googles x and googles y'. yep, and you will continue to have those chains on your wrists as long as you choose to have them there. everyone has the choice to start migrating to other email providers, other phone platforms, etc.
im not saying its easy, or something that can happen quickly... but lamenting the fact youre in up to your neck is no reason to give up. baby steps. make bob wiley proud.
My solution is (and for quite a long time was) to use NewPipe on mobile and Invidious on pc.
they can cry harder
Opera GX + uBlock + ABP. I stopped seeing this shit a long time ago. (Opera de-googles where necessary, and has its own store. You can still install from other chrome stores, if something is not available in theirs)
Frankly though, Alphabet needs to start being made accountable for their own "de-privacy" behaviour, in the name of their own profits.
And on a side note, is it just me or did 404media just came out of nowhere, and is spamming "news" posts. I've read a few of them, and they seem more like opinion pieces, and less factual. They really seem to have little supporting evidence, proper content (the meat, proof, details) and the complete post content is paywalled.
Defederated world, can we please prioritise non-paywalled sites over monetised ones?
And cloudflare controls the connectivity.. luckily they're not (yet) evil and are happy just to provide infrastructure.
It seems now that they've done the "full blocking", Edge is no longer a "trusted" browser for logging into my Google acount anymore (it still had a functioning blocker).
As much as I'm against Google: why are the the bad guys in this specific instance? They are in many other instances, absolutely. But here, they dare to block a service that legitimately costs a ton of money from being used without them making anything in return. That's not the usual evil corp BS they pull. That's rather reasonable if you ask me. Let's not exhaust ourselves in that and focus on the real Bullshit they try to pull like their web manifest ad nightmare!
If they start showing me this message, I’ll have no reasonable choice except to disable the ad blockers for YouTube. Sadly I’m embedded in the Google world with a gmail account and I use their photos service. I can’t risk losing access to those.
No doubt they’ll roll this anti ad block technology out to their other sites in the future and the internet will suddenly be a bleak, hideous place.