this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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I am sorry but that argument simply doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me. Unless I am missing a facet, you are saying that your autonomy outstrips their rights? If we were to make an analogue version of that argument would your autonomy to use your hands how you see fit, allow for you to walk into a shop and take something without paying? It seems like, unless I’ve missed something, that’s the analogy.
Commerce and indeed society has always been a balance of personal autonomy and rules, with YouTube you’re going to a website and circumventing their chosen rules. I might not agree with YouTube’s methods, but I don’t think I can get behind the argument they are impinging on your technical rights any more than Tesco does if you try to half-inch a chocolate bar.
You're getting my two points mixed up.
For my first point, paying, let's say you subscribe to a newspaper. You pay a monthly fee, and the newspaper comes to your house. Nothing special.
For the second point, let's say you have a free, ad-supported magazine. Once you obtain the magazine, how you read it and what you do with it is up to you. If you want to go as far as to cut the ads out before you read it, you can do that. And you should be able to do that if you want to, because the magazine is in the privacy of your home.
Ad-supported websites are no different whatsoever. The web server gives you HTML, JavaScript, some media, and together, it suggests a way for your browser to render the page. When you download the assets, you've acquired the "free magazine," and your personal browser, in the privacy of your home on your own machine, decides how it should be displayed.
Imagine if there was a way for the ad-supported magazine to attempt to force you into spending 10 seconds on each page with ads. This sounds silly, but this is what Google is attempting to do. HTTP responses are nothing but simple chunks of data. You can use telnet to retrieve it without a browser, if you wanted. It's simply a virtual analog to pages in a magazine.
That’s a great analogy and helps me understand your argument much better. There is something I think you’ve missed though, which is that advertisers pay to be in the publication, and they pay at the point the print occurs. Rendering in your browser is the analog to hitting the print button, not putting it on a server to be pulled down. In your analogy, the advertiser has paid already before you consume the magazine; but for YouTube the advertisers don’t pay as their adverts are never compiled into the magazine. If you want to write a browser that still calls the ads api and plays the video in the background so YouTube gets the ad revenue but you have “cut it out” then I don’t imagine google would care half as much.
This is true. It does still line up with the freedom of consuming content the way you want on your personal browser, however.
Imagine playing a browser yourself. You use telnet to download the HTML for a video. You inspect it, and find that there is a JavaScript asset in the HTML. You make a GET request to fetch it. A dozen requests later, there is a link to an ad.
What do you do now? Are you obligated to submit a GET request to it? Do you not have a right to choose to skip it? Earlier, in telnet, you skipped downloading thumbnails that you didn't care about, so how is this any different? Shouldn't you be able to choose this? Say you didn't have freedom, and you actually were obligated to type out a GET request to fetch the ad. After the ad has been downloaded, you are technically consuming the content offline in a cache. Now what?
Are you obligated to view it? It's a stream of data. You could inspect the content in a hex editor as a way of viewing it, but it's that enough? Did you actually consume it? Are you forced to use a functional media player on your personal device to play the ad? How much of the ad are you forced to watch? What difference does it make at this point, since you've obtained the data, and you're left to your own devices? Shouldn't you have the freedom to do what you want?
If YouTube does some ad payout stuff behind the scenes, server-side, then that's server-side, and it isn't any of your business. It's the same as their data collection, sharing with third parties, building a profile on you, tracking hit counters, etc. In fact, they spend a lot of effort ensuring that it doesn't become anyone's business but their own. Just because the asset is an ad versus a JavaScript asset you also didn't care about doesn't matter. You have the freedom to consume the content that's given to you in the privacy of your own home.
You could liken ads to free physical mailing list forms in the free magazine. Just because you obtained the magazine and the publisher makes money off you signing up for junk mail doesn't mean you're obligated to do it. You are given the option to request more media, and you are not forced to make any effort to cut it out of the magazine, fill it out, and mail it in. You're also not obligated to read any amount of the junk mail that you receive as a result of the form. This is your choice, and you should be able to flip to the next page instead, which is equal to not being obligated to type GET requests by hand in a telnet console, which is equal to choosing not to make the requests in your browser.