"Stealing". Bless you, not giving up data while accessing something public is not stealing. Defending yourself against surveillance is morally unambiguous. Society as a whole, across the entire world, needs to start talking about how we support these services in a post-ad-revenue-model world.

I suspect whatever the answer we settle on, it'll be less awful than what exists now.

why should I care about """stealing it"""? I don't have any Alphabet stock, I am not employed by Alphabet, in any case they can afford to run Youtube at a loss or just shut it down.

It's kinda cute how much you care about the profit margins of a company when it will (likely) never benefit you. Maybe you should setup a donation fund for Alphabet in these hard times.

I mean surely you would personally give them at least 20 USD considering how badly they are being wronged, maybe 100 if you are feeling generous.

They gotta realize its a bigger game then, they don't get to be the only people making selfish rules. As long as people can create tooling to separate the wheat from the chaff, that's what people will be doing. If ads were considered fully benign people wouldn't spend time making, sharing, installing tooling to bypass them. Since google et al has accepted they will continue to do the unpopular thing, they shouldn't act surprised that people try and make things slightly better for themselves as they are able to.