While I'm not pro YouTube, I think it's fine for companies to decide how to monetise their product, including things which were originally free. If you don't like free services, stop using them

If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates!

There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.

>If you don't like free services, stop using them

Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.

> If you don't like free services, stop using them

If they don't like users using their service how they deem improper, ban them? they know what accounts are doing it... There is a reason for this cat and mouse, and its not ending with youtube banning people.

A lot of the current issues i see with it, is that it is treated like the go to service for video hosting...

Just consider image hosting... If i see an image in a thread and click it (much like people will do with youtube urls), and block the ad that was on the hosted site, is there this much uproar about it? That image hosting site might charge 5$ to do what an adblocker already does... If they wanna lock that up? actually lock it up, and remove the "service" portion of the business, otherwise I don't see any legs to stand on here.

Service in my eyes here, is a public service. This is a company posing as a public service, and occasionally deciding it hates how a % of the public is using their service. So they hand them a 10$ a month ticket that they pretend is required, but they will never take action on users who dont pay that ticket.

As soon as the laws on the books get enforced and they get broken up, sure. Until then, absolutely not.

> including things which were originally free

Oh, I despise this tactic so much. It means the company has known from the start that they can't offer it for free in the long term, but decided to subsidize it in order to gain a dominant position and get rid of competition. This breaks the conditions needed for a free market to work. In other words, they win market share for reasons other than efficiency, quality, or innovation. That's why some forms of government subsidies are prohibited under certain agreements, for example. Some multinational corporations have annual revenues larger than the GDP of many countries and can easily subsidize negative pricing for years to undercut competitors, consolidate market share, and ultimately gain monopoly power.

Also, the company has hinted false promises to the customer, as it signals that they have developed a business model where they can offer something for free. For example a two-sided marketplace where one side gets something for free to attract users and the other side pays (as it profits form these users). Users can't know something isn't sustainable unless the company explicitly states it in some way (e.g. this is a limited time offer).

So from the user's perspective, this is a bait-and-switch tactic, where the company has used a free offer in order to manipulate the market.

Is this product or hampering the way the web works with video? Go to any other site with a <video> tag and you won't face similar issues.