TOS is like me putting a sign up at the end of my driveway saying if you approach my home, you owe me $10. If you pull up to my house, I demand the $10, and you don't pay me, I cannot forcibly take $10 from you, nor can I call the cops or sue over the $10.
You never agreed to anything and certainly not in any legally binding format.
Notices are not contracts and TOS notices are notices.
I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.
How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.
However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
But don't worry, something else will eventually kill YouTube. Most likely they'll miss some sort of disruptive innovation. Like maybe in 30 years everyone will have content beamed directly into their neutral implants and only a few old people will still watch online videos.
That’s what they are actually trying to do lol.
Having said that, I 100% agree. If Google allows for non-logged in users, it's a public website and we can consume it however we like, until Google decides to try to block us. That's what it's doing now, trying to block users from consuming the content however they like, a core feature of the public web. Fortunately, blocking us is very very hard for sites not behind a login. If they want not-logged in use, they either go to war with my tech, favored by platform, or they let it slide.
Now, Google owns Chrome, so they can also go to war in the browser and standards bodies as well. But for now, the web is open and accessible and that means, wiht the right technology (Firefox plus uBlock Origin for me) you can watch all those video ad-free and there's nothing Google can do to stop you.
