The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?
In a previous generation, governments would go after this blatant anti competitive behaviour.
I’m sure the EU will still.
It’s just a shame that there’s really only one government organization globally that will still stand up to corporations.
To be fair China will send you to a reeducation camp or disappear you if you try to act like a western billionaire.
China will make you disappear for many things including speaking up against the genocide of religious minorities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For now
Honestly with the speed new BS crops up I don’t think they will.
The current US Federal Trade Commission is quite agressive compared to other FTCs historically.
True. Though they have been stuck with 30 years of damage simply reverse too.
Think of it as 30 years of rent they’re now claiming.
Yes, but they haven’t fixed this specific problem that just broke in the last day or so, therefore the FTC is a corrupt useless organization that pours hot wax on kittens
then why do we have like 4 conglomerates making everything in the grocery store?
Some people are reporting it happens when your accounts get flagged by YouTube for blocking ads and that using a private browsing session can be used to bypass it, so it’s possible this isn’t a blanket thing?
Either way, they can go fuck themselves.
If you’re on Firefox and using uBlock Origin (which you should), you can add the following to your filters list to essentially disable the delay:
! Bypass 5 seconds delay added by YouTube www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.001)It doesn’t fully disable it, just makes it almost instant, because Google has been doing shit like looking at what gets blocked to combat ad blockers recently.
I use youtube without logging in, and it runs normally. If I use a private window, that’s when I get a delay when loading videos.
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Thanks I’ll get back to this later
Do you want to hear about the Microsoft “bug” that affected Firefox that was only recently fixed after 5+ years of getting reported?
Corporations really hate non-profit products that are superior.
If you’re networked with the right people in the US, laws don’t matter
Yes. The US DOJ has a website for reporting antitrust concerns
Yes. It is. And consumers can’t do a thing about it.
Anti trust that evil Google
Yes.
Is it more anti competitive than McDonald’s only selling McDonald’s burgers or preventing you from bringing Taco Bell tacos in from outside?
🙄 No it would be like Ford owning gas stations and pumping faster for Ford vehicles than Chevy.
Doesn’t Tesla do the equivalent of that with charging stations?
Maybe. But Tesla doesn’t own over 50% of the charging station market share.
True… I think even if they don’t, it’s still potentially anti-competitive.
(Gawd, Imagine how life would be with gas station incompatibility with your car. Holy shit that would suck).
That’s less restrictive than what I said. McDonald’s won’t let you bring tacos in at all, doesn’t just make you wait at the door for 2 minutes, etc.
Edit: and to anyone quibbling with my McDonald’s example saying you can in fact bring tacos in, that was just an illustration. I can find plenty of examples of one establishment not letting people bring food in from somewhere else.
I don’t feel your analogy quite captures what is going on here because both McDonald’s and Taco Bell are in the same business. Maybe if you explain it more.
Google owns a major web destination, YouTube, essentially a line of business in its own right, in addition to Chrome, also its own distinct product. Firefox competes with Chrome but Google is allegedly using market dominance with YouTube to make it harder for Firefox to compete.
If a company owns two products A and B and if A is used to access B, company cannot hinder competitors to A via fuckery in B.
This is the kind of thing that MS got in trouble for – using Windows to tip the scales in favor of Internet Explorer by tightly integrating it into the OS.
McDonald’s prohibiting people from using their restaurant, which is not itself a separate product with a separate market. Nobody is clamoring to go to McDonald’s restaurant spaces to sit and eat. It’s just part of the restaurant offering. So there is no leverage like there is with YouTube being used against a competitor for a totally different product. And besides, Taco Bell can do the same as McDonald’s. They’re on equal footing.
If in your analogy there were some other product that McDonald’s owned that could penalize you for going to Taco Bell your analogy would work.
- Google – Ford
- Mozilla – Chevy
- Firefox – Chevy car
- Chrome – Ford Car
- YouTube – Ford gas station
Thanks for your question.
I see food preparation and dining rooms as separate industries, even if they don’t appear that way at first. The most we can see this in practice is probably mall food courts. Web content like YouTube is the food and the web browser is the place or mechanism by which we consume “food”.
Is being allowed to take tacos into McDonald’s a hill I’m going to die on? No, of course not, it’s just the first illustration I thought of. Lol. I could probably come up with a better example, that one was just easier and more visual.
To be clear, I’m not saying there’s no anticompetitiveness happening, I’m saying that all vertical integration is basically this same amount of anticompetitiveness, and vertical integration is often very good, which is why we tolerate it all the time.
I agree the comparison to MS and Internet Explorer is somewhat similar. I also think that case was not decided particularly well, and it’s not as revealing as it could have been since it ended up settling out of court, and IE ended up getting crushed by Chrome just a few years later.
I wonder, if Google made a new app called YouTube that could only watch YouTube and made it the only app that could watch YouTube, sort of like Quibi, would that be more competitive or less competitive? No one is asserting that Quibi was anticompetitive at all, correct? That would be even worse for Firefox users, they’d completely lose access to YouTube unless they downloaded a 2nd app, this time YouTube instead of Chrome, but like Quibi it would seem to dodge all these competition concerns completely. I think that shows how these concerns can be selective and kind of nonsensical.
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Yes. Yes, it is!
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McDonald’s doesn’t actually give a shit if you bring in food from other places.
McDonald’s probably does care, but their minimum wage employees don’t.
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How?
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Pick a different example then. In my experience movie theaters don’t let you bring food in from outside. McDonald’s still won’t sell a Burger King burger regardless of whether you could bring one in.
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Is it more anti competitive than McDonald’s only selling McDonald’s burgers
Yeah, it’s more like the next time you go to Wendy’s, McDonald’s will follow you and try to lock the doors before you go in.
No, not really. Google can’t do anything about my taking my Firefox browser and watching videos from somewhere else. There are countless other video streaming services.
There are countless other video streaming services.
There are government websites - including my state’s dmv - that exclusively use youtube. You’re being disingenuous when you’re saying you can just use another streaming service (and I don’t believe you don’t know it).
The efficient solution to that problem is governments using a different platform that’s actually neutral. The government has full control over where they host their videos. Using that as a reason to TRY (a likely long and drawn out process) to force Google to change its policies company-wide is silly.
I’m not being disingenuous. I watch videos on a bunch of platforms. It’s easy.
The efficient solution to that problem is governments using a different platform that’s actually neutral.
First time I’ve heard public services called efficient, but ok.
I’m not being disingenuous. I watch videos on a bunch of platforms. It’s easy.
We’re not talking about you here. You’re purposely ignoring the problem, and therefore being disingenuous.
Public services aren’t efficient, but they can surely change themselves more efficiently than they can force a multi billion dollar company to change its ways.
I’m surprised you’re not more worried about the government outsourcing its functions to a company you seem very suspicious of.
If the government decided to have vital public meetings only in a private venue you have to be a member of or something, the proper fix is not to force the club to accept everyone, it’s to have the government stop having vital meetings in private places.
I also don’t see a problem because everything of value these video streaming services offer is replaceable by one of the many other streaming services. The fact that YouTube is the biggest or most recognized does not change anything for me. The fact that there is some content that is only on YouTube doesn’t, either. That’s a normal thing that happens in an economy. Ford dealers only sell Ford cars, Coca Cola doesn’t sell Pepsi, etc.
Yes except everyone knows YouTube has a massive, massive market advantage in that space. And the channel you want to watch isn’t on the others. And you know this too.
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Because that’s not how internet business works.
How does it work, then?
This is not a thing that Google invented and developed on their own.
I don’t know what this is referring to or what it has to do with anything.
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It’s bizarre how blatent this is. Google has so much power over web standards that Mozilla have to work really hard to make firefox work, but YouTube don’t bother being subtle or clever and just write ‘if Firefox, get stuffed’ in plain text for everyone to see.
this isn’t much different than when microsoft added code specifically to break windows 3.1 when run under dr-dos instead of their own ms-dos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch
Something tells me they survived.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for a while. If you try to use Google Meet in Firefox, you can’t use things like background blurring. Spoofing Chrome works in that situation as well.
And the stupid thing is that all I use Chrome for is Meets… And that’s it. Do they really think they win me over?
Not you or me. But most people, yeah.
That is, as always, the problem: it works for them. The average Joe isn’t going to implement a new filter into ublock…
How does one “spoof” chrome?
You can change your user agent string, the text your browser uses to tell the web site you’re looking at what browser it is, either via your F12 developer tools menu or via an extension.
The most convenient way is with a browser extension that changes your user agent. You can also change it in the developer options of most browsers.
It works for me now. Only took them 8 years
In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.
BTW, this:
So this is part of a larger adblock checker, if the ad doesn’t load within 5 seconds, it fails and triggers the adblocker warning. Since the ad should load in 3, they’ve set it for 5. If you have ubo, you won’t see the warning that it then wants to pop up, it just seems (and is) a 5 second delay. Changing the UA probably removes this from Firefox because then the clientside scripts will attempt to use builtin Chrome functions that wouldn’t need this hacky script to detect the adblock. Since they don’t exist, it just carries on.
I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn’t checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.
That being said, the solution is still bullshit.
That is just the timeout function, not the call stack. It is likely called in a function that uses a UA check.
I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn’t checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.
The UA check can happen before the function is called though.
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This is some ultimate scumbaggery.
This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)
It honestly probably is
EU might hit them for it. I have no faith that the US government is going to do anything.
The thing that gets me is they think no one will ever find this stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of people (maybe more) who are actively looking ways to block ads and get around this behavior. There’s no way it’ll ever go unnoticed.
They could literally have used some variance in implementation, server side bandwidth limitations, etc, but THIS is just blatantly obvious
I wonder if it’s a case of malicious compliance.
Exactly what I was thinking. Let’s not say it too loud for the sake of our mole(s)
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The world runs on the shoulders of disgruntled employees. This smells like a deliberate act backed up with a paper trail to protect the guy in charge of implementing it from taking the blame. But, I realise that also may be my imagination… It’s a compelling tale regardless.
The world runs on the shoulders of disgruntled employees.
That’s one hell of a phrase that should keep any CEO awake at night.
I believe that Google is just trolling people real hard. There are much better ways to disable any adblocks, but they are not even trying.
Is there something like:
If(not chrome){add_delay()}
?
No, the full context of the code snippet doesn’t appear to check the browser user agent at all. Other comments have explained that it’s most likely a lazy implementation of a check for ad blockers.
Ok so this is just client side I’d imagine I’d be pretty easy to make an addon that removes the code
That’s not the point.
This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.
Doesn’t this break competition laws?
Couldn’t Google/YouTube be sued over this?Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.
They really weren’t that effective with Microsoft then either. The antitrust was far too late for Netscape and allowed Microsoft to hold a dominate market share with IE until they allowed the browser to deprecate and Google came in with a much better browser and took over the browser market (and are now doing the same bullshit).
As long as we keep giving these companies meaningless fines or wait until the damage is irreversible companies are going to always push the limit and look at any repercussions as just a cost of doing business.
So yeah, not much faith in anything changing.
That is why I am in favour of the financial death penalty. Fines should be 10x the damage done. If a company cannot pay it, they are required to become a non profit.
Fines should be 10x the damage done
What are your monetary damages for this?
I think a better solution is one year of global revenue (not profit) as it’s really hard to determine damages in cases like this. That way, it’s legitimately a death sentence regardless of the size or scale of the company. If you set the fines at an amount not linked to profit or revenue, all you’re doing is making it extremely hard for the little guy but less hard for the big corporations - the ones you really want to go after.
I like it, much more practical.
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Yeah stuff like this really needs to be percentual and fined to the CEOs and the board, not the company as an entity.
Oh, Microsoft valued at 200 bil for shareholders? Well sorry C’s and boardies, you gotta scrunge up 2 bil each now, personally. Those are fines they’d at least notice.
(edit)
Come to think of it, the fined-personally-to-the-decisionmaker might really be the big thing here on its own. The company did this shit under you, CEO. It was your corporate policy and hiring practices that allowed this to happen, even if you did not press the button. You pay up. You take the blame, not the people under you just following orders.This just ignores the reason that corporations exist in the first place, to shield people from personal liability. There is a mechanism by which you can go after that called “piercing the corporate veil” but it is an extremely high bar to hit.
the reason that corporations exist in the first place, to shield people from personal liability
Which is the problem. As parent rightly pointed out, lack of personal liability is exactly why corporations pull this kind of bullshit. The solution is to lower the bar for holding individuals, particularly executives, personally responsible for the actions of the organizations they control.
You should look into all of the anti-monopoly actions that Lina Khan has been pursuing as head of the FTC. Under her tenure the watchdogs have had more teeth than ever before. It takes time for this stuff to make a difference, but they are most decidedly doing the work (Cory Doctorow has some excellent write ups on this if you check his blog).
He lionizes her a bit much, but yes she has done far more than her predecessor.
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EU anthem intensifies
Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
And all they had to do was drag the trial out until a favorable administration took office.
Well they also dragged out the trial so long that time and costs rendered the plaintiff (Netscape) hopeless.
malicious slowdowns like this are why microsoft abandoned (non chrome) edge, too. Cause they couldnt keep up with fixing the constant fuckery google was doing, and users are idiots and blamed edge for all the problems.
Microsoft was kind of getting their comeuppance there. They did the exact same billshit when they dominated the market with IE.
You’re right.
Lets let google get away with murder because Microsoft did bad a decade+ ago.
I don’t think that’s what I said? At least it’s not how I meant it.
You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws
Not in the U.S. Not as long as conservatives (incl. neo-liberals) have the power to protect them.
Our conservative politicians are bought and paid for by large anti-competitive corporations.
Bought and paid for with a pittance.
They are bribed for so little that it would be almost easier to make a dystopian sounding PAC with money raised by small dollar donations to bribe them to do what the people want instead of them doing what rich donors want.
Only if that PAC could somehow guarantee a cushy job post politics.
Yes. And you can submit your complaint here
Well, can’t hurt to try.
Yeah, the fines just aren’t big enough for Google to care.
Wait for it to become equally shitty in all browsers, and then you can only watch in a special Youtube Windows app.
I wonder how long it’ll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.
That’s an antitrust case if ever I saw one.
It could literally be a minute wait & I still wouldn’t use Chrome.
Google heard you and have increased the Firefox delay to 1m 30s. Would you please consider using Chrome now please?
Best I can do is boycott YouTube.
Piped-bot now my best friend
I swear every time i try to use those links from the piped bot, the content either never loads or has severe buffering problems.
You need to change your instance. Next time you face this, go to preferences and try changing the instance.
I didn’t know you could do that with piped, thanks
Where would one find that bot?
On here
Oh, the one that finds every YouTube link and comments a piped link in some communities? Yeah, I find that bot very useful too!
Ranting on Lemmy about a company while being addicted to (one of) their products seems to be much more effective, according to other comments in this thread. /s
Helpful comment!
The only helpful thing to do is stopping using YT, if you think they behave in an unrespectufl way. Complaining/ranting on Lemmy is going to be exactly as helpful as my previous comment. But, hey, who cares? I don’t even use it. Literally, not my problem.
What are we supposed to complain about then?
I didn’t say you shouldn’t complain. I said that doing it is useless. Stop using YT if you want to send a message or just deal with it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edge would like a word
Sigma Edging
Sometimes I get curious about chromium based browsers and consider giving them a shot for a while.
Then Google does shit like this and I keep mainlining Firefox out of spite. Half the reasons people experience “issues” with Firefox are just dumb garbage like this (see sites / web content being developed with Chrome-based in mind)
the website DRM thing is one of the most blackpilled and evil uses of technology i’ve ever seen
the people in charge of developing that should be put in a padded room and never allowed to see sunlight again. fucking god.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down: Why do they get to have padding in their room?
I would assume so they cant easily hurt themself and have to live and suffer through it for as long as possible
But then they’ll be comfortable in there, because it’s soft and padded as opposed to cold and hard.
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I mean this in the least condescending way:
as far as I’m aware, even after looking it up, I think you are misusing the term blackpill.
Blackpill usually refers to a manosphere/Incel or Qanon type who has given up completely and lost all hope. In the the case of an Incel it’s that there’s no hope in ever escaping Inceldom. In the case of q anon it’s that none of the predictions about the “storm” will ever arise or come true.
I looked around and couldn’t find any other contexts that it’s used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pill?wprov=sfti1#
I am willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I looked all over search results etc.
Heck I use god damn duckduckgo out of spite nowadays
DDG is legit great and even sometimes better than Google search now. I also am a SearXNG enjoyer
DDG, even though apparently a Bing front end, gives legit better results than google
It’s honestly good. It misses that “Algorithm profile” that Google has where it starts to “understand” what you mean but it’s still pretty good.
(Example. If I type in “genocide” in Google, it knows I often look for Undertale related things and pushes “Undertale genocide route” related content. For DDG I need to be clearer about what I mean)
It took a bit getting used to but I prefer it this way now.
I think it’s still possible to ethically use Chromium browsers, so long as it’s one of them that’s been reviewing and removing anything ludicrous Google adds. I don’t even mind MS Edge on most of my computers for the most part. Firefox doesn’t load well on my tablet.
I have never had a reason to switch from Firefox. I used Chrome once out of curiosity, but I didn’t like it.
Google has been doing this kind of thing for years, to strangle their competition. For example, back when Windows Phone existed, Google went deliberately out of their way to cripple youTube, and maps. Apparently google will do anything they can to create lock-in and faux loyalty.
Google are completely evil. Here we’re talking about them using their popular products as weapons against competitors in unrelated areas. But also have a history of copying products made by others then using advertising strength to promote their version over the original. And if that somehow doesn’t work… they buy out the competitors. Both youTube and google maps are examples of this.
Wow, and it’s literally just “If you’re using Firefox, wait five seconds.”
Elon moment
Let’s remember, fellas, that big tech is not a disease that needs to be eradicated. Let us not forget that Google is a legitimate corporation, not merely a group of professional stalkers. And let’s be clear: obviously you are the crazy ones for worrying about this, naturally…
Pardon my jest; I was merely echoing the absurdities often heard.
Maybe just maybe it’s time we stop with this garbage and actually stop using their services. Nothing will change if we keep using their services.
The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms. Each time we use a service from Google or any similar big tech entity, we inadvertently endorse their methods.
YOU hold the power to change them by using FOSS alternatives instead.
The most direct and effective strategy to inspire reform in their practices is to stop using of their platforms.
The whole “the free market could fix it” is just neoliberal bullshit. The most hated companies in the world continue to bring in record profits and its not because people prefer their chocolate is harvested by child slaves.
They’re fully aware that it never works, but they just keep suggesting it over and over again, growing richer with successive failure, all the while blaming consumers for not preventing them doing sleazy, greedy things.
The actual most direct and effective strategy is regulations. That’s why they hate them and why there are so many of them in politics.
Yes, but the problem is the convenience.
Google has made their services convenient, which is why everyone I like to watch content of posts their stuff on YouTube. Both alternive websites and the content on them is often of inferior quality and difficult to find.
Then use alternative youtube clients, like piped or freetube.
Or even better: spend money (if you can afford it) to host a peertube instance that automatically rips the videos off of youtube.
That’s an even stronger message that you’d rather spend money than use their crappy free services.
good old fosstube
“Do no evil1”
1 unless we can make money from it.
Did someone actually investigate and find the exact place in scripts where this logic takes place?
EDIT: Yes. https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-down-videos-firefox-3387206/
Adding this to your uBlock Origin filters also makes the problem go away:
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
