Good counter-point, except that your local supermarket has to respect three separate market pressures that Google (edit: to be clear, I mean YouTube) clearly has no regard for:
- Tight regulations.
- Respecting its consumers.
- Robust competition that isn't prone to monopolistic enterprise.
So no, I don't feel that we should 'fuck them, too I guess' because when I go to the supermarket I feel like I'm the customer, not the product. I feel that I get what I'm paying for and that my time is respected. Nothing about YouTube leaves me feeling like that. There's no sense that I'm a respected customer and therein no sense that there's any value in trying to respect a clearly one-sided relationship.
I was tempted to state that I was wrong, clearly you have thought about this, but I don't agree with this perspective at all and won't be changing my opinion. If we're in the business of calling things out that "nobody said," then nobody said Google was a charity.
The 'nobody has a gun to your head' approach to laissez-faire mercantilism likes to ignore how important free market access is. Lack of access can be just as bad as a gun to the head, if not sometimes worse. This is a one sided argument in favor of corporatism that doesn't address access. The main thrust of my point.
I don't think YouTube has ever left me feeling like it had any regard for me as a consumer or even valued my time. It appears, from the many complaints I've seen by YouTube content creators, that many of them don't feel valued or respected either. By the time Premium came along it had long lost me as an interested customer. There's no feeling that one should honor a one-sided social contract because that requires an actual relationship. If I felt that YouTube actually cared about anything other than being the middle-man that ensures that I get served ads, and demands--but not delivers--respect for it, then maybe I would reconsider. Until then, I will enjoy their competing products. Ad-Blockers and supporting alternative hosting sites that make me feel more valued. They've assisted in creating their own black-market for ad-avoidance, and that's the free market working.
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