[abenga]

I'm going to feel icky for being a corpo simp, but how is asking for payment for a service an "extortion attempt"? Not asking as a YouTube premium subscriber or watcher of of ads (can't pay for Premium in my country and cannot bear to watch ads, so I use Firefox and an alternative client on my TV). I find it hard to frame it as an ad free but still subscription free service I am entitled to, and any attempt by Google to circumvent my workarounds as something unethical on their part.

[simongray]

Google only sells YouTube Premium bundled with a music subscription in my Spotify-dominated country, because they obviously want to use their large video platform to expand into music.

Classic monopolistic behaviour.

[jpc0]

I'm going to guess the reason for this is you would be pretty annoyed if you get ads on music videos watch on YouTube even if you are paying for YouTube premium, and if you aren't 99% of users would.

You can't have your cake and eat it, Google neither and they will get what's coming but this is not the battle to pick, they do far worse than put ads on a video sharing platform

[abenga]

I honestly don't see how that is relevant, unless your perceived value of just watching videos ad free is lower than whatever price they have set; you can ignore that feature, right?

[simongray]

It's a feature to only sell the bundled product at a much high cost?