Hi all,
As the title says, YouTube is trying to restrict ad-blockers. But the ones that I am using are freely available through Chrome WebStore. Both Chrome and YouTube are owned by Google. Why would a company try to fight an issue with one subsidiary while giving us an out for the same issue through another?
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In: Technology
Google isn’t against ad-blockers in general. Google is against Google’s ads being blocked. They are taking action, specifically with YouTube, because they are trying to sell YouTube Premium as a service, which effectively is the same thing that the ad-blockers (and YouTube Vanced, which is what really started all of this) provides for free.
All that said, what u/TheLuminary said also holds true. They can take action against things like YouTube Vanced because it was basically pirating their code. Pushing things like Manifest 3 as an API doesn’t really constitute an abuse of monopoly power as doing so doesn’t force people into doing things their way. However, taking advantage of the fact they they hold the majority market share on web browsers to impose their will for the sake of profit wouldn’t sit too well with Government.
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