Breaking up a monopoly must follow sustainable business lines. The court’s early idea of forcing Google to spin off Chrome risked crippling the product and disrupting the market without restoring competition. The remedy was later scaled back, leaving Google with little more than a slap on the wrist. By contrast, the AT&T and Microsoft cases succeeded because they targeted natural, profitable divisions that could stand alone. Addressing areas like Azure or MacBooks, which are not monopolies, does nothing to reduce monopoly power. A more effective remedy in Google’s case would have been dividing its multiple monopolies, rather than divesting loss-leading but essential units. Profitability alone does not define a monopoly, but once one is identified, ensuring that each division can operate as a viable business is crucial.

The issue is you're still not paying for the content nor paying the creators.

You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some creators.

Maybe some never experienced an ad because they have been using an ad blocker since before ads on Youtube became a thing?

Well, we grew up in the Great Pirate Era

Why don't you use ad blockers?

Oh, I'm not against paying for a service. I'm willing to pay more, but that's the issue: companies will happily sell you their basic enshittified product and never provide you with an option of actual good usable one.

I will happily pay YouTube for just one feature: dub all content I see into my native language.

I do feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Since the invention of bittorrent there is no need to have a client-server middleman for distributing large files like videos.

If the bandwidth bankrupts them, then boo hoo. They take advantage of network effects so no one can go anywhere else.

Don't feed the bears. That's what I say

My gripe with Youtube Music is that the bitrate quality of their music is lower than Tidal or even Spotify. YTM audio files that are actually on Youtube will only stream in 128kbps.

> 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service

I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.

Aside from Music, these are all negative features that are valuable only because YouTube is so obnoxious.

I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.

There’s an excellent free ios app called “Unwatched” which lets you make playlists, set defaults per channel such playback speed, and lets you play videos in the background. I use it for “podcasts” which are video only.

And you don’t have to log in.

You also get >2x playback speed and higher bitrates on some videos.

> Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show").

Previously search was just search. It wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad.

Now it shows 5-7 results from actual search (often really bad results).

The next section is "People also watch" which quite often has very passing relevance to what you look for.

Then there are shorts.

Then there's "explore more" which may or may not be relevant to your search, and it has "+N more" underneath.

And then there's the rest of the search which, again, may or may not be relevant to your search at all.

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I think it was slightly fixed recently, so the results are a bit more relevant, but it still is just ... weird

Paying to remove ads is negotiating with terrorists.

YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed.

So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.