[safety1st]

This kind of fantasy microeconomics debate is silly at best, disingenuous at worst. We are talking about a company with $280B in revenue per year and one of the highest profit margins in America. How they spend that money is not connected to what is fair or what makes some kind of logical sense in your head. It's connected to whatever will increase their profits further.

All you are doing is laying down cover fire to support further advances by an abusive monopolist. YouTube's financials don't HAVE to add up. Google owns advertising for the entire Internet! The entirety of YT could be a loss leader just to suppress the growth of streaming video businesses outside of their control, and the Google monopoly would carry on.

[petree]

Having a loss leader like this is exactly monopolistic behavior though. The fact that Google are trying to make money from it is expected and more fair to their competitors than just having it completely free, and not having ads either.

[safety1st]

No. Trying to make money is something that all businesses do, not just monopolies. Having loss leaders is also something that many businesses do.

Here are behaviors that are fairly unique to monopolies: raising prices while degrading their product. Many businesses try to do these, but monopolies, who have no significant competition, are more likely to succeed. Sure enough this monopolistic behavior is what Google has just exhibited: by banning people who use ad blockers, they have either degraded their product, or raised the price (from $0 to the cost of YouTube Premium for those users), depending on how you look at it.

They can do this because they are a monopoly.