YouTube has existed for 19 years, and started showing ads within 9 months of the initial launch. The premium service for no ads has existed for 10 years.
There was never any explicit or implicit promise of "everything for free, with no ads", and you using a technical measure to avoid the ads that have been there for almost two decades doesn't create a promise either. Like, if you shoplifted for a week and didn't get caught, do you feel entitled to never pay at the store again?
Comparing my control over my own computer with shoplifting is grotesque.
I hit a Google endpoint and it sends me data. Google has no control over what my browser does with that data, nor should it.
They do have the right to refuse to send me that data if they decide I'm doing something with it they don't like, such as blocking the ads. As arms races go, I like my odds.
The original claim was that there was some kind of a "everything for free without ads" promise and that blocking adblockers was "going back on a promise". The first claim is demonstrably untrue. The second seems pretty inconsistent with your view that they're "free to not send you data".
It seems pretty clear the OP was saying that YouTube had no right to try to prevent adblocking, and that the reason was that since there was a time they didn't prevent adblocking, it created some kind of implicit promise to allow it for ever.
In that context, I think the analogy to shoplifting is pretty fair. I'm not saying that you're a thief. I'm sure you're not. I'm saying that you taking something for no compensation doesn't create an obligation for the target to continue allowing you to do continue taking it for free, forever.
> In that context, I think the analogy to shoplifting is pretty fair.
I don't.
A fair analogy would be that just because a credit union had free donuts and coffee for the first six months it operated, doesn't oblige them to still offer that twenty years later.
Shoplifting is criminal behavior which someone might get away with, when YouTube was (briefly) giving out product without ads, gratis. Nor is it illegal to block ads, nor should it be illegal. Do I agree that it's weird to expect YouTube to still be ad-free just because it briefly was? Yeah, sure.
Not only is ad-blocking not illegal and not immoral, but US the federal government's cyber crime division actively recommends it as a good security practice to avoid being defrauded:
For anyone that considers ads to be a legitimate form of "payment", consider whether you feel the same about a site running a background crypto miner without your explicit consent. If you find the crypto miner worse for some reason (my sense is most people seem to think that'd be wrong), note that the crypto miner is a much more direct form of payment that doesn't also spy on you and does not seek to manipulate you.
Also note that the same company that's running that expensive infrastructure pretty much completely controls the direction of the web, and could overnight make it so that almost everyone's browser has built-in torrent support and allows magnet links as a src for video tags. Or they can choose to have that not be true so that you must distribute media through expensive centralized platforms that only a multi-trillion dollar corporation like them could afford.
It was to get a lock in, isn't it? They could've easily offered a premium service even then.
The reason most people don't want to pay and want to use ad blockers is because that is what they promised.
You go back on your word, there's going to be consequences.