All of this is exactly what the Web is not supposed to be. Users shouldn't need to buy certain hardware to access different parts of the Internet. It's one of the big problems with the appification of the WWW in general.
I don't think the intention was to block access to the web site. The problem was that Amazon was using a proprietary native app to access YouTube videos, bypassing the web site and without support for any of Google's monetisation strategies they have in their own YouTube apps. That's clearly a foul and has nothing to do with the open web.
Arguably Google went too far by blanket blocking based on device, but it might have been the only viable option available to them. Now that Amazon has folded and made the app a wrapper to the YouTube web page rather than accessing the videos directly, I expect Google will enable access again.
They are definitely blocking access to the web site now. First, Google blocked the app because it 'didn't comply with their policies'. Then Amazon changed it so YouTube access from these devices was, essentially, directly through the website. Now that is blocked as well.
Google has a point about Amazon not carrying their devices, but I'd take a different approach - I'd lead every YouTube video played through a Fire device with an ad for Google's devices.
What I find jarring is the asymetry of the effect.
Amazon punishes Google directly as a company: users wanting Google product only have to change the URL in their browser.
Google in return punishes customer having already bought their Amazon device.
If the customer uses a Fire stick for intance, the only alternative to have youtube on the tv is to buy another dongle.
The level of fucking with the end customer is disproportionate.
And Amazon Prime Video punishes me for trying to play video on a device via VGA cable, which they say is not HDCP compatible, therefore they limit it to 480p (when the projector supports HD/1080p).
If this really annoys you, and it would annoy me, you can buy an HDMI splitter that strips HDCP. They run from between $5-$40 depending on whether you trust some no-name brand.
and the rest of the world just source their content via explicit means. Because they find their time more valuable then a "legal grey area"/"moral high ground"/"doing what is right".
That's clearly a foul and has nothing to do with the open web.
I disagree. On the "open web", users must have the right to consume the content the way they want to. Or do you also think that adblockers, user styles, and the like are "clearly a foul"?
The fight is understandable, but that's why I'll always choose to consume content using a general-purpose computer instead of these restrictive appliances.
I mean, yes I agree - adblockers are "a foul" In the sense that it's very likely against the content providers wishes. I'm not saying users shouldn't be using them, but don't be surprised if the content provider tries to block access to people who actively avoid any monetization via adblockers.
I'm very open web in concept, but just because I want the web to be open doesn't mean I'm entitled to everyones content for free with no restrictions.
As a content provider, you should be allowed to put whatever restrictions on it that you want - just like the real world. Just keep your restrictions off of my computer. Eg, I DO NOT want to see DRM chips on my PC to protect companies. I am certainly fine with them requiring a DRM specific browser though, I can choose not to go to their site and not to use their browser.
> As a content provider, you should be allowed to put whatever restrictions on it that you want - just like the real world.
In the real world, I can sell you a paper magazine or give it to you for free. I cannot prevent you from ignoring the ads or hiring someone to cut them out with scissors.
If a site wants to require me to pay in order to access it, that's valid. But if they want to say "you must instruct your computer to download and display our ads", that's not valid, IMO.
My browser is an agent that works for me. The server is an agent that works for the site. We should each be free to instruct them as we wish.
I give you a magazine for free with the stipulation that you not cut the ads out; you are correct that I couldn't stop you from doing so with the magazine you currently have but I can certainly refuse to give you another magazine.
// We should each be free to instruct them as we wish.
That's not what you are claiming at all. If the company's server determines you are preventing ads then it is within the company's rights to instruct the server to stop serving your browser content.
> But if they want to say "you must instruct your computer to download and display our ads", that's not valid, IMO.
Why not? I can sell you a video stream without ads for $1. Or I can let you watch it for free with the implicit agreement that you'll watch ads (which will cover the costs of the bandwidth you are using). You want the best of both worlds - you want to watch it for free and not watch any ads. How is that not stealing my bandwidth? If you are going to block the ads, that's fine, but it's your moral obligation to back out of my site and not to consume my bandwidth.
If I mute the TV and go to the bathroom while the commercials play, am I stealing? If I read a magazine and flip past the ads, am I stealing? If I change the channel on the radio on a commercial break, am I stealing?
I understand what you're saying about the producer's dependence on ad revenue. But never before has a media existed where someone could force you to consume advertising against your will.
If you provide content with ads and people decline to look at your ads, you've got a problem with your business model.
And by the way, I don't block ads on, eg, StackOverflow, because the ads are tasteful and useful. But if a site with news articles wants to show me animated, sexually suggestive ads for cheap pharmaceuticals, yes, I'm going to block that. I'm not going to let them steal my bandwidth and my mental calm for that.
> If you block ads on my website and I detect it, It's fully within my rights to blacklist you for stealing.
Other than the word "stealing", I agree. It's fully within your rights to block or allow access however you want. And it's fully within my rights to decide whether to look at your ads.
You control your server. I control my browser. This is good.
You can mute your computer and go to the bathroom while watching youtube or amazon video. You've lost none of the rights that you had with the tv.
It's a terrible analogy that people should stop using in this debate. You can debate about whether it's good business on their part. You can debate about whether they should force drm onto your computer. But you can't reasonably debate that just because it's on the web they shouldn't be allowed enter into a financial exchange with consumers and that they shouldn't be able to refuse to do business with people who do not wish to enter into that exchange with them.
You can mute your computer and go to the bathroom while watching youtube or amazon video.
...until they find a way to detect whether you actually viewed the ads, or maybe even retained any of the content from them.
But you can't reasonably debate that just because it's on the web they shouldn't be allowed enter into a financial exchange with consumers and that they shouldn't be able to refuse to do business with people who do not wish to enter into that exchange with them.
You're implying that it's OK for consumers to essentially be force-fed ads, if these companies eventually develop such technology that lets them do so. Do you really want to live in such a society?
You're implying that it's OK for consumers to essentially be force-fed ads
Nowhere did I imply that. I implied that it's ok for consumers to be forced to transact for content in the same way that they are forced to pay for the food at their grocery store.
And yes I am fine living is such a society. I can always choose not to enter into the transaction. No one is forcing me to watch Youtube, Or read a blog, Or listen to a podcast.
> If I mute the TV and go to the bathroom while the commercials play, am I stealing? If I read a magazine and flip past the ads, am I stealing? If I change the channel on the radio on a commercial break, am I stealing?
I think everyone can agree that adblockers go far beyond these examples you listed. Adblockers are an automated, shareable process.
> But never before has a media existed where someone could force you to look at advertising against your will.
Last time I checked nothing is stopping you from muting your computer and going to the bathroom during ads. Like I said, you just want your cake and eat it too. If you block ads on my website and I detect it, It's fully within my rights to blacklist you for stealing.
So your options are to watch with ads or not watch. Why is this so hard?
If Walmart only let you "buy" DVDs at the checkout by watching ads that the cashier shows you, how is it okay to just steal the DVDs because you don't want to watch the ads?
Not watching YouTube isn't a realistic option in some cases (e.g. there are jobs where you'd get fired if you refuse to use YouTube, or you need to watch YouTube to be part of a social group).
I can buy DVDs somewhere else, while most Internet videos are only on YouTube nowadays.
Users have the 'right' (and I used that word very lightly) to do such things, but companies and publishers also have the 'right' to respond to things that interfere with their products or business models.
I think the difference comes by who is doing it. An end user doing it is their own right. A corporation bypassing another corporations monetization is something they should be permitted to deal with. They are essentially gaining a competitive advantage by bypassing ads for youtube on their own devices, so Google should block them until they comply.
> ...wrapper to the YouTube web page rather than accessing the videos directly, I expect Google will enable access again.
Probably they won't. WebViews don't return device ids amd don't let you set persistent cookies which are basically what's needed to get ad targeting correct on mobile.
Another example: I can't watch purchased YouTube videos at full resolution on in my Web browser. It tells me that I need to buy a spyware-infested device that doesn't give me full control over the operating system.
This is why I don't like the web in it's current form. It's not anymore about freely sharing information. It is about creating uncopyable 'experiences' and programs in the web. I don't want services I may or may not use. That is not the web I want. Maybe if browsers didn't include JavaScript, the situation would improve. But even the supposedly user-friendly Mozilla is backing JavaScript.
Actually that is why you should like web in current form. Google blocked native youtube app, but kept youtube web accessible from amazon devices. IMO there should not be be proprietary app to access youtube or any other service, if the same experience could be delivered for everybody via web.
If I owned the Youtube, I'll block Amazon too. They're practically taking advantage and not want to give anything back. Don't want to sell google appliances, don't want to participate in youtube ad program. Only word that came to mind is to describe such a attitude is leech.
Today it is still youtube.com/tv but Google has injected Popup that says the service will be disabled on 1/1/2018 (https://i.redd.it/g8t5z4owv5201.jpg)
I do not know what will happen on 1/1/2018. Redirecting to YouTube main page is likely not a very good option because the UI would be almost unusable on TV. I have seen some people suggesting the Silk Browser as a work around, I have tried it is it not very user friendly and does not work at all with the youtube/tv interface.
I am likely ordering a Roku Today to see if I like them, Amazon is risking alot here, this YouTube situation may be the final straw for me (and many others I suspect). They started putting ads on the FireTV Device, they are spending a crap ton of money to get Sports I have no interest in, now YouTube is pulling out. It seems every day the FireTV ecosystem get worse and worse, time to move on i think
Prior to FireTV we used Roku device branded as nowtv. Someone unlawfully accessed it, either from Roku or with their permission, and disabled side-loading preventing us from using it to view family photos, local media, etc. (with Plex app, as it happens). Shame, the movie package we were buying from nowtv was excellent.
In short Roku and nowtv is dead to me.
Google making FireTV worse means I'm not going to buy Google - I can't endorse that behaviour - so what else is there? Just no-name android devices??
Probably I'll use a hack; presumably using a proxy to mask FireTV, or stripping UA info is going to work.
>Actually that is why you should like web in current form. Google blocked native youtube app, but kept youtube web accessible from amazon devices
From the article:
> Amazon has responded, and its response points to the unfair nature of Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," Amazon's statement reads. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible."
If you think about it, those statements doesn't make sense.
1. Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it.
2. Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website
I understood it, that Google blocked Amazon to access youtube via native app. And Amazon reaction was to switch their youtube app to webview, which basically renders web version of youtube.
I'm glad you and the above poster have said this, I also feel very strongly that the web has been completely trapped by coorporate interests.
I feel like the web as we know it should be abandoned to coorporations and people that want an open platform for knowledge sharing should start something new that has to stay open.
>I also feel very strongly that the web has been completely trapped by coorporate interests.
"corporate interests" haven't trapped the web.
People are choosing to pretend that the web has somehow ceased to exist outside of a few silos, or that javascript has no purpose other than to further corporate or media interests, or that Facebook owns HTML now, but none of that is true. The web is just as open as it's ever been.
Just because mainstream viewing habits tend to converge towards a few corporate owned social media sites does not mean the web has become owned by corporations, it just means people have gotten lazy and don't want to work to discover new content.
We are building drm into the browsers themselves now. We are letting companies tell people that "there is no way to access media, unless you go through our walled garden" and defending the company! The open web is farther gone than it's ever been.
I shouldn't have to point this out to someone on Hacker News but browsers are not the web. Facebook is not the web. Twitter is not the web. Not even Google is the web.
No one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use EME when they distribute media, and it certainly will no more be the case that all media will be forced through DRM and a walled garden than it ever was. The companies that will use this are the companies that would have used DRM anyway, just in another form. The web, as a whole, is unaffected.
This is the nub of the net neutrality argument for me.
We don't need to "start something different" we just need to ensure that what's there can still be used for both corporations, and the public at large.
The only people who are actually serious about creating alternatives to major social media networks are alt-right (for lack of a better word) who have been banned from these services.
Of all these alternatives, I think bitchute.com is really innovative in that it has a Bittorrent video viewer that solves the bandwidth usage problem by going p2p. Not a lot of stuff on there yet. For now, that site is mostly full of political content that would get banned, or at least demonitized, on YouTube.
I have a hard time getting over the irony that the alt-right are going to be the ones to save the open Internet while the rest of Silicon Valley sits around and does nothing because they need to be protected by the machines of loving grace [1] that are the vast content moderation and filtering apparatus of the major social networks.
Bitchute.com is just another centralized system, that happens to offload some of their costs onto their users. Using webtorrent is cute, but no conceptually no different than what early Spotify did. They still control what you're allowed to see.
We need something like BittorrentYouTube. Something that is somewhat indexed, content can be directly linked to, and there's no-one to control what can be there and what can not.
Of course it will be a bit slower at startup times, but it's still faster than a video that has been removed in your country or removed due other arbitrary reasons.
I feel differently. For the most part, I still the Web is about freely sharing information - most of the stuff from the good old days of 1998 is still there. However, in addition various companies who otherwise wouldn't put their content on the Web, have to decided to do so, but on the proviso that technology exists that gives them adequate control over how it is distributed.
Javascript takes control from the client and gives it to the server. This is a terrible idea, that has ruined the web. Are there good sides to JS? sure, but they, by far, don't outweigh the bad.
You can verify javascript as well. Most libraries provide their source code and copies of the minified versions that run in your browser, and a lot of javascript isn't even minified.
And unlike everything else running on your machine, Javascript is sandboxed and limited in its capabilities, and you can turn it off if you want to. Try pre-emptively turning off your C++ runtime before booting up. Hell, for that matter, try rewriting your binaries on the fly the way you can override and rewrite javascript in the browser.
Yes, there are potential threats from running javascript, but javascript still relatively less threatening than everything else, including every other kind of executable code that can run from the web, such as java applets, flash and silverlight. I understand you don't like javascript, but you're overstating the malice of forethought behind its application in all but the edge cases.
You can, and I do. But most sites use it in a way that breaks most of the functionality if you don't enable it. This is bad, and encourages bad habits to those that don't know what they are doing.
> Yes, there are potential threats from running javascript, but javascript still relatively less threatening than everything else...
yeah, all of those plain html attacks have been pretty damaging.... oh, wait, there are hardly any, because html makes sense, and is designed with the user in mind. JS is the opposite.
> including every other kind of executable code that can run from the web, such as java applets, flash and silverlight.
Those are shitty too. But just because they are worse, doesn't make JS acceptable.
> I understand you don't like javascript, but you're overstating the malice of forethought behind its application in all but the edge cases.
I'm not overstating the malice of forethought. I get that 99% of JS is by people who want their site to work well, and use it with good intentions. But even good intentions, done wrong, lead to bad results.
If anything, this shows how overblown the EME fuss was, given sevices that don't use it (like YouTube) are becoming less interoperable than services that do (like Netflix).
Also you have to use a native app for Netflix and if they wanted to, they could also stop supporting Amazon devices at any time. There wouldn't even be a work-around thanks to EME.
YouTube uses it for the viewing of full movies that you've bought from Google Play but view on the YouTube website. Which is about 0.0000000001% of the content on YouTube and not terribly relevant to this thread.
The YouTube TV service doesn't use EME, no. And isn't terribly relevant to this thread either.
1. It is relevant because the claim was "YouTube does not use it" not that "most of youtube does not use it"
2. I firmly believe now that EME is standard YouTube will start using it, especially as they start rejecting independent creators in favor of more High Budget Commerical Creators and Tradional media whom they already show a preference for. These Companies will demand it just like the big Movie Studios
3. I am not subscribed to YouTube TV service so I can not confirm but do you have a source or technical document showing they do not. I would be shocked if they were allowed to get Commercial deals to carry main stream cable channels and stream then in the clear with no copy protection.
There's a huge irony that Google, who has spent millions of dollars investing in net neutrality supporting organizations and astroturfing 'grassroots' efforts to allegedly protect the open web is blocking users from a website based on the device accessing it for anticompetitive business reasons.
Google Fiber did a similar thing: they initially banned home servers, which was later relaxed a bit to only ban commercial home servers, but regardless it shows Google's hypocrisy regarding neutrality. (Sure they had some rationalization that since they were prohibiting something entirely it wasn't really interfering with net neutrality.)
As a particular hilarity, Google Fiber has repeatedly dodged being classified as a telecom so that it isn't subject to the regulations Comcast and Verizon are.
I agree. To narrow it down, IMO the main problem is breaking interoperability (on both sides). Web is built on open standards to ensure diverse systems can talk to each other. As long as systems comply with well defined interfaces they should be able to communicate.
A company can introduce additional constraints on top to limit access. However this should still be done based on standards. Using a variety of derived properties to block specific device type is evil in my book. My 2c.
I mean, instead of buy proprietary devices like Fire Sticks and Chromecasts, you could just connect a computer to your TV, have it all, and call it a day.
Of course, "all" does not include 1080p playback on Netflix unless you use Edge or Safari
It isn't specialized hardware, it's generalized hardware with a specialized software stack. Nothing prevents you from accessing the content except for business-level decisions. The point was that we want to avoid tangling business decisions with the general purpose hardware.
(Almost everything these days is a general purpose computing device, even our "specialized" hardware is general purpose.)
