"google really will do everything up to and including petitioning the US government to make open source software illegal, rather than stop forcing adverts on Youtube users."
I just posted that to my microblog. It was inspired by a problem I had just now with FreeTube: it seems YouTube has deployed some kind of new captcha system designed to flummox frontends like FreeTube and Newpipe. Google has dumped so much money into new anti-frontend measures for YouTube— user-agent blocking, IP blocking, new codecs— when the answer to all their problems is easy and completely free. Stop forcing adverts on everyone who uses YouTube. That's the reason why so many people are using Invidious and FreeTube in the first place: unblockable advertising. I know it's the reason I personally quit using name-brand YouTube, and I would gladly go back there were it not for Google's fruitless war against ad-blockers.
This is just the way this culture operates. This is a pro-business, anti-accessibility state, and it's not just Google or other tech companies that are like this. In one of my school papers, I posited a hypothetical situation:
The city government loves to install roundabouts at crossroads, claiming they're safer than regular crossings. However, this has not proven accurate, with the crash rates at crossroads that have never seen a crash in recent memory going up by orders of magnitude after a week of roundabout use. The reason for the sudden increase in crashes is related to people having been avoiding the new roundabout because, we're Americans. What do we know from roundabouts anyway? However, time and increased travel distance compelled people back to the roundabout, and now they're wrecking their cars because, like I said, what do Americans know from roundabouts? About 25% of motorists decide not to use the roundabout and start going other directions, simply factoring the extended travel time into their schedule.
The city, however, doubles down on the new roundabout and starts increasing traffic police in all non-roundabout areas, the prevailing logic being that no one will want to get stopped for miniscule infractions of the law and so they will use the roundabout. However, this does not work; motorists are avoiding being stopped by familiarising themselves with traffic law and following it to the letter, causing the safety factor of the surrounding area to go up, meanwhile crashes are still happening at the roundabout.
Once again, the city doesn't take the hint. Rather than removing the roundabout, they start to shut down other arterial roadways in order to compel people into using the roundabout. Everyone going alternative routes have been compelled to use the roundabout again, where they get crammed into by all the assholes driving giant red pickups. (Did I say that out loud?) The safety factor has been eliminated and the crash rate is again at an all-time high. In order to accommodate the increase in traffic, the city builds a multi-level roundabout against the wishes of the residents living in the area. The neighbourhood may be excessively noisy, but at least the new roundabout is ugly as hell.
Someone decides to take matters into his own hands one night and crashes a lorry into the main support column. This damages the roundabout such that it can no longer be used, however the city does not remove it. They repair it instead, while simultaneously installing bright floodlights to illuminate the ground for a radius of 500 metres around the roundabout.
One night, someone cuts the power to the lights and installs an explosive device on the roundabout, destroying it again. The city repairs it and adds nightvision security cameras to the area. Then, the next month, someone blinds one of the cameras with a high-intensity laser beam and blows up the roundabout a second time. Again, the city repairs the roundabout and now they install police surveillance booths at all entrances to it, in addition to the lights and nightvision cameras. In another 2 months, the roundabout is destroyed again by someone who was posing as a police officer; so the city repairs it AGAIN, and this time sets up patrol drones for wide-scale surveillance.
At this stage, the city has increased the crash rate in a section of town by routing as much traffic through a once calm neighbourhood as possible and has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars, tearing up roads and fortifying this roundabout, when they could have spent $2 million simply removing the roundabout and restoring the crossroads.
FOr anyone who isn't an American and was wondering what we have to deal with in this country, that's what. Obviously, the blue text was purely hypothetical, but that's the mentality of basically all decision-makers in this country in both the public and private sectors. It's been this way since long before Trump ever showed up, and this is ultimately what is going to destroy this country. Stronger security, more countermeasures, harder encryption, bigger, faster, more.
Anyway, I give Google's new countermeasures 2 weeks.