> Disallow the Google indexer in your website’s robots.txt.

Ask news publishers how this went last time they tried it.

You can avoid Google for a lot of services, and I encourage people to do so. I use Fastmail, it's great. It doesn't allow me to completely avoid Gmail given that messages I send to family members and business acquaintances with Gmail accounts are still ending up on Google servers, but it is an improvement. OSM is great, Duckduckgo has completely replaced Google search. I run custom ROMs on my Android devices. I'm bullish about Pixelfed as a replacement for Google Photos, although transitioning family members is going to be very painful. Some of this is possible.

But when we start talking about robots.txt, Youtube, etc... there are parts of Google services that are so monopolistic and so tightly integrated into ordinary life that they are unavoidable. You want to explain to family members why you can't view their kids' recital that they put on Youtube?

And I know when normal artists and creators come up in these conversations, the popular answer is "just don't watch them", ie "just don't participate in any shared culture, it's not that hard, it's not like media is a shared experience that connects us as humans or anything" -- and I've kind of given up arguing about that, but it is always worth reminding that there are entire communities where participation within those communities is practically impossible without being able to view Youtube.

Heck, even something that's actually gotten a lot easier to avoid, Twitter, is still basically impossible to completely cut off because if you participate in a community anywhere, odds are good you're going to start seeing Twitter links pasted into chats at some point. Without Nitter, there would be communities I couldn't participate in online and I would have to be regularly playing the role of the annoying guy on every server saying, "sorry, I can't view that link you just posted."

Youtube sets itself up as a middleperson in front of culture. Yes, people can pay for better services, we can jump through technical hoops and accept personal inconveniences in order to avoid abusive companies. And people like me are willing to do so, I am willing to make my life more annoying and more difficult to avoid Google. But asking people to walk away from communities and shared cultural experiences and to inconvenience family members and associates around them and to cut off their access to services that indirectly require participation in Google ecosystems -- that is a different ask entirely.

> You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I'm fine with this. If adblocking caused Youtube to fail and go out of business, it would probably be healthier in the long term for creators and communities and for video hosting online.

It's not going to happen, Google wants to control the market and the instant anything threatens that they'll turn Youtube back into a loss-leader, because Youtube is not and has never been designed to be a sustainable business and profits are a secondary concern for the company. But it would be good in the long-term if it did fail (albeit admittedly very painful and negatively impactful in the short term for a lot of people).