The fuck?? Isn’t this anti competitive behaviour?
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.
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
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.
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
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).
Tesla, you mean the one that literally made and freely distributed the open standard that almost all vehicle chargers are based on? And may have a better understanding of the technology as a result and able to charge faster accordingly? That same Tesla? What a wild notion!!
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.
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).
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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.
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How to spot a Ms employee
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:
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?I wonder how long it’ll be before google gets sued for their anti-competitive behavior.
Oh I imagine the papers are being filed as we speak, because this is blatantly illegal.
Well you typically need standing in order to file a lawsuit, who would do it? Mozilla are probably the only ones. Why would this cause them to do it when past similar practices haven’t?
Perhaps YouTube premium subscribers would have standing as a class action, since Google is materially worsening the experience of a paid product if you don’t use their browser
I personally don’t think an argument like that would hold up. A company making its service worse in itself isn’t going to win court cases, and this is hardly the worst example of a tech company making its products worse unless you use more of their software.
Perhaps not, but it’s not just the act of making the service worse, it’s doing so measurably to paying customers ONLY when using a competitors product. With those caveats, I think you could at least argue standing. Winning is a whole other battle.
Europe will step in as usual
How would Mozilla finance a court case against google though?
Microsoft, Mozilla org, maybe apple
EFF or government
On what standing though? Mozilla potentially has standing, and if the government finds that google is a monopoly, then the government could have standing, but nobody else.
Users affected by it, Mozilla, any other company that comes to support Mozilla, watchdog groups like the EFF…
It can also be brought by attorneys general and governmental regulators, the FCC and FTC might have a bit to say about it…
Antitrust suits aren’t civil cases, I don’t think, so “having standing” is a bit different
I’m not a lawyer though so I could be way off base, but the antitrust cases I’ve been aware of I don’t think they were brought by companies but by government agencies
Isn’t Mozilla a non profit? I don’t they can sue for anything along the lines of hurting profits to the company.
Can’t you sue for loss of income regardless?
They do have a for-profit subsidiary that potentially could though
Of course they can. If the word profit is confusing you replace it with returns or finances.
Google funds then I’m pretty sure…
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
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.
see FTC anticompetitive-practices
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
It is being currently being sued by Epic Games for Anti-Trust behavior. Google offered millions of dollars to Epic so that Fortnite would be available in the Play Store and not in Epic’s own store.
Been there, done that, and came on top.
They are already in one anti-trust trial for search engine shenanigans.
Trying to convince people to use your product by crippling other people’s stuff really needs to stop. Did they not do an analysis on the issue of diminishing returns?
That’s an antitrust case if ever I saw one.
EU: aw shit here we go again
Just like that time that one operating was made to stop shipping with that one browser.
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)
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.
Everyone should remember that Google itself isn’t really as evil as the people who work for it, those “people” are the only thing keeping this shitty company going. They go to work every day to try and make this world a worse place, those people who enable evil need to start to be recognized for who they truly are, the ones who want total enshittification and love watching you suffer. At what point do we start to look at thr root of this problem?
Wow, and it’s literally just “If you’re using Firefox, wait five seconds.”
Elon moment
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/
This sounds like something that would be in the back end so likely not. But if spoofing user agents fixes the problem then I’d say it’s evidence enough to warrant a deeper look.
Is that easy to do?
Yes. User Agent is a http header that is part of every request you send to a server. As such, it is 100% client side and it can be whatever you want, it’s just a text string. For layman users, I’d recommend using an addon for it, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
Of course, you can also change the user agent string in the browser config manually. The official Mozilla support page describes the process in detail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox
When they decide to do tricks in the backend differently between browsers, there will be ways to overcome that.
it’s pretty inconclusive if there’s no context for how that code is called. I’m kinda confused why the article wouldn’t have provided any additional detail other than a single line of code. why bother digging at all?
it’s part of their anti-adblock code. without going into too much details, they can instantly find out whether ad-block is trying to do anything on chrome, but on firefox they need a 5 sec delay
Which is honestly to Firefox’s credit. Making it harder to find out stuff about your browser is a good thing, unless it has to do with feature support.
But the fact that they don’t give a shit and are willing to ruin the user experience for it, that’s despicable.
I’d be more likely to believe that if spoofing your user agent didn’t immediately fix the issue.
Have you read past that screenshot of the code, though? It says the problem was not limited to Firefox, it seems Edge users reported problems as well. Anecdotally, I did experience that delay problem on Thorium this weekend as well. I have seen a variation of this problem almost a month ago, where sometimes the video would take a long time (like, over a minute, sometimes) to load, or often just not load at all. So I just chalked it up to Youtube having done something stupid on their end.
that half sentence in the aa article though
“That move makes sense in many ways, as the platform needs to make money to survive…”
should we also start a gofundme for youtube, i am suddenly worried for them /s
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.
“Do no evil1”
1 unless we can make money from it.
There’s a reason that doesn’t appear on their site or in their docs any more. It was a canary clause.
Any organisation that needs to remind themselves not to be evil is already intrinsically evil.
Very overtly and loudly claiming a quality which should be self-evident in oneself, one’s company or one’s nation invariably means it’s not really there.
“People’s Democratic Republic”
“The Greatest Democracy In The World” - Lots of US politicians, including those activelly engaged in gerrymandering and passing vote supression laws.
The dictum, supposedly from Einstein, about only the universe and human stupidity being infinite, needs to be ammended to include hypocrisy.
The country with the most Freedom™*
*Freedom™ must be redeemed in Freedom™ tokens; sufficient Freedom™ tokens entitles you to trample others’ Freedom™; insufficient Freedom™ tokens entitles you to die in the gutter
I think they changed it didn’t they?
I think it’s “do the right thing” now
For the shareholders
Ahh, much more leeway
Right - “Do no evil” uhhh… Is that not your default setting?
Not anymore: they ditched it for “do the right thing (for my wallet)” a couple years back
I feel like there’s scales of evil here Google starts to need to highlight on a whiteboard
Actually, their slogan was “Don’t be evil.” But they revised it recently by adding a comma after the first word.
I mean… “evil” is arbitrary, right?
Not arbitrary enough that they thought they could keep saying it. They ditched that about a decade ago.
“It’s evil not to make as much money as possible”, Google founders. C-suite and board, probably.
Adding this to your uBlock Origin filters also makes the problem go away:
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)Not noticing this change from the EU… Guess they’re too afraid of pulling that shit here?
Google LOVES A/B testing so it might be just that. I haven’t noticed anything either.
True, could just be lucky. I still haven’t noticed any ad blocking changes either, but then again I’m using Firefox with μBlock Origin…
They’ve been caught before, but there’s no regulation for this in some regions
Big shame that this wouldn’t be illegal. But hopefully soon. Very anticompetitive behavior.
It is, just not everywhere. Like the USA
Yeah, the “everywhere” was implied, thank you 😊
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I’m in the EU, using Vivaldi, and have the delay since yesterday. It’s not on every video though. Seems like UBlock and YouTube are fighting each other every time I open a new link.
That’s interesting. Could be uBlock doing its thing then, for which I’m quite thankful
