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Soggytoast ,

Lately (few months) YouTube will not load whatsoever on my android phone nor tablet very often, activating a VPN fixes it instantly. Using basic YouTube app

ARk ,

Likely just a network-related issue

thomcat ,
@thomcat@midwest.social avatar

Using a VPN on a shitty network won't magically make your network connection better.

spamspeicher ,

It is possible. Maybe the peering from his ISP to YouTube is shit/ overloaded. That was an issue for Deutsche Telekom for a few years because Telekom didn't want to pay for better peering. With a VPN it is possible to get good peering to your ISP and YouTube and in return faster load speeds.

a1studmuffin ,
@a1studmuffin@aussie.zone avatar

That's an antitrust case if ever I saw one.

bruhduh ,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

EU be like: aw shit here we go again

PrairieRanger ,

I wonder how long it'll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.

HawlSera ,

Oh I imagine the papers are being filed as we speak, because this is blatantly illegal.

sweeny ,

What law are they breaking? Not trying to defend Google or anything, just curious what law is blatantly being broken here because I don't know of one

laurelraven ,

Blatantly anticompetitive behavior where you (ab)use your dominance in one sector (i.e. YouTube) to choke out competition in another (i.e. make it slow on competing browsers) is illegal in the US and the EU, at the very least. I don't know the specific laws or acts in play, but that's the sort of thing that triggers antitrust lawsuits

orrk ,

see FTC anticompetitive-practices

HawlSera ,

It's an anti competition law, they cannot penalize you for using a competitor service. This would be like getting fined by McDonald's because I went to Taco Bell.

squirrelwithnut ,

This is why net neutrality is important. To prevent bullshit like this from happening.

Rinox ,

BTW, this:

https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/0e13c670-4966-4073-89df-f042fe9cc6de.webp

Meltrax ,

This is some ultimate scumbaggery.

filcuk ,

This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)

LufyCZ ,

It honestly probably is

UnculturedSwine ,

EU might hit them for it. I have no faith that the US government is going to do anything.

Thermal_shocked ,

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.

Natanael ,

They could literally have used some variance in implementation, server side bandwidth limitations, etc, but THIS is just blatantly obvious

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

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.

localhost443 ,

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.

Rustmilian ,
@Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

Doesn't this break competition laws?
Couldn't Google/YouTube be sued over this?

umbraroze ,
@umbraroze@kbin.social avatar

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.

Jaysyn ,
@Jaysyn@kbin.social avatar

It could literally be a minute wait & I still wouldn't use Chrome.

Voltage ,

The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?

PerogiBoi ,
@PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca avatar

In a previous generation, governments would go after this blatant anti competitive behaviour.

ObviouslyNotBanana ,
@ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world avatar

I'm sure the EU will still.

PerogiBoi ,
@PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s just a shame that there’s really only one government organization globally that will still stand up to corporations.

Damage ,

For now

psycho_driver ,

To be fair China will send you to a reeducation camp or disappear you if you try to act like a western billionaire.

Sheeple ,
@Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

China will make you disappear for many things including speaking up against the genocide of religious minorities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dojan ,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly with the speed new BS crops up I don’t think they will.

rchive ,

The current US Federal Trade Commission is quite agressive compared to other FTCs historically.

Metatronz ,

True. Though they have been stuck with 30 years of damage simply reverse too.

Zoboomafoo ,
@Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world avatar

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

s1nistr4 ,

If you're networked with the right people in the US, laws don't matter

vxx ,

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.

rchive ,

Is it more anti competitive than McDonald's only selling McDonald's burgers or preventing you from bringing Taco Bell tacos in from outside?

grue ,

  1. Yes. Yes, it is!

  2. McDonald's doesn't actually give a shit if you bring in food from other places.

agent_flounder ,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

🙄 No it would be like Ford owning gas stations and pumping faster for Ford vehicles than Chevy.

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

Doesn't Tesla do the equivalent of that with charging stations?

dubyakay ,

Maybe. But Tesla doesn't own over 50% of the charging station market share.

agent_flounder ,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

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).

rchive ,

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.

agent_flounder ,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

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
qfjp ,

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.

rchive ,

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.

agent_flounder ,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

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.

qfjp ,

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).

rchive ,

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.

qfjp ,

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.

micka190 ,

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.

moody ,

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.

agent_flounder ,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

Yes. The US DOJ has a website for reporting antitrust concerns

VampyreOfNazareth ,

Anti trust that evil Google

scholar ,

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.

ares35 ,
@ares35@kbin.social avatar

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

Lmaydev ,

And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch

tetris11 ,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

Something tells me they survived.

aseriesoftubes ,

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.

Lemminary ,

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?

chiliedogg ,

Not you or me. But most people, yeah.

sulsaz ,

That is, as always, the problem: it works for them. The average Joe isn't going to implement a new filter into ublock...

FontMasterFlex ,

How does one "spoof" chrome?

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

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.

scholar ,

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.

agent_flounder ,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

In my other comment I provide a link to the US DOJ anti-trust complaint center website.

the_blackwell_ninja ,
@the_blackwell_ninja@mastodon.online avatar

@scholar @db0 Buy enough of the competition and pay off enough government regulators and as a company you get to do pretty much do whatever you want.

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