They realize it's a service issue, they're trying to corner the market so that they don't have to care that it's a service issue.

YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn't resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.

Companies are free to use labor from anywhere, but make sure we can't get their products from anywhere.

I mean... that is the point.

Pay for premium, watch ads, or don't watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.

If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I'd probably pay. I don't use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I'll stop watching Youtube.

Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What's happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.

YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube's losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.

But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.

And this is what it looks like.

As for risking competition, at this point, I don't think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.

I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There's a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That's what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.

Tubular is better. It's a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock built-in.

If one does that, be prepared to defend yourself against the copyright infringement lawsuit that's coming your way eventually.

There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that's possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other "issues" doing so, but I'm sure some datahoarders could chime in.

I’d have expected this to happen years ago.

They are perfectly free to do that. They just have to resubscribe from their new home country at the new rate. Just like with telephone service or cable tv. It's not like they will get in trouble or would be prevented from moving.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That's it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it's just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

Ads are bad (I agree).

Paying for things is bad.

Then what's left? YouTube should somehow be ad free and free of cost for the user forever and ever? Who's gonna pay for the enormous costs of operating the service?

People are going to start yelling at me about capitalism and enshitiffication. Both of which cause problems, but what do you propose here? Magic?

Youtube might be the literal most valuable site in my life, up there with Wikipedia and search engines.

A large part of my payment also goes to the channels I view.

Somebody should invent a way to use them for serious things, like connecting to your company’s intranet or something

Also good for getting to pornhub.com if you live in one of the states they’ve blocked.