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Shouldn’t the one public free good be something like alphafold, not YouTube.

That's not how public companies work, shareholders would sue in fact. If Google was private they could to whatever they want (see Valve), but they're not, so they don't.

The idea that this anti blockers is a privacy issue is silly.

The idea that somebody can afford to give something away is just insane. It also shows how little you know about the cost of running a streaming service.

I think was is absurd is this premise that youtube has just been hemmorhaging money for google all of its life. Google has never been perfectly forthcoming about their finances on this but most analysis over the years have suggested that this is not some charity product for the world, but a major component of googles profits. Even if it were just that, why start squeezing for pennies when you are at a 1.5 trillion market cap? Why so desperate for a few percentage points more? That move alone should tell investors to decamp and diversify if alphabet feels like they don’t have better strategies than this.