Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
And I am fucking loving it. With this move, Google has effectively started an arms race between the team they have implementing this Adblock-blocking crap and the vast majority of the technically competent internet users in the world.
Unless the rules of how the internet works fundamentally change, Google is not going to win.
Why do you think they were pushing so hard for WEI? They did try to fundamentally change how the internet works.
Precisely.
i wouldn’t be surprised if this was partly a war between the team they have implementing this and the team they have implementing this, in their spare time
I’m not that optimistic. They could implement some sort of aggressive DRM. In the US, all they have to do is label protection as DRM and then it becomes illegal to even have any discussion of how to circumvent it. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t going to bother with any ad blocking. In the end, this could end up hurting Google if people build decentralized Youtube alternatives and then they could take viewers away from Youtube.
They would end up shooting themselves in the foot. They are on shaky ground already and it would only take a new platform that can entice a few of their top content producers over to lose enough chunks of their revenues to hurt. And all they have do is keep fucking around to find out what a tech-literate group of nerds who hate big corps can do when they are aligned in a certain direction.