[judge2020]

The argument is that there is a clear Quid Pro Quo here: you can use Google's expansive infrastructure[1]/bandwidth to obtain video content if you watch their ads or pay for Premium. Although Google hasn't banned people for blocking them, they have every right not to serve videos to you if you don't want to watch the ads.

1: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

[dheifidjeh]

The web is a request response model. I'm not blocking ads I'm merely choosing not to request them. The idea that I owe them 5 seconds of feigned interest so they can mislead their clients with fake numbers is mental gymnastics

[judge2020]

The technical process doesn't matter; they'd be entirely within their rights if they only sent your client a "watch token" after the 5/15/30 seconds it takes for you to watch an Ad. You don't owe them anything as long as you're fine getting nothing in return. The only reason they don't do such thing is because they know a large amount of people watch with blocked ads (blocked, as in preventing Google from getting your client to show ads) and doing so would destroy brand reputation and PR.