The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

Can I just rant about how absolutely ridiculous it is that google, a company that has made it's fortune off the back of the web and public internet infrastructure blocks downloads. Maybe when it started this was a necessary compromise. In 95' it cost between a hundredth ~ a tenth of a cent to serve the average webpage, it costs google much less than that to serve a video, literally 0 if the users ISP already cached it (think about how unfair that is for a moment a AI generate short evicting some live saving medical document from your ISPs cache so that when you request it the owner of that resources pays again and the user is delayed in their request for potentially live saving information. GROSS!).

The part that is so infuriating is that they try to turn around and capture that value would should rightly be owned by the public by offering downloads for premium members, especially when that we KNOW the only reason YouTube isn't totally financially ruined is that the ISPs are legally required to price worthless youtube's (literally AI generated) spam traffic the same as useful services. (Net Neutrality)

And the are using these ill gotten gains to create their own backbone for yet more profit. Entirely pointless exercise when you realize the government is eventually going to break these companies up and will of course nationalize the one that owns all the infrastructure. Corporations are simply not the correct tool for managing infrastructure that the public relies on. I'm sure anybody whose tried to run a business on top of a google service can attest that's it's a bad strategy and is guaranteed to fail in the long term.

If you ever tried hosting video at scale, you'll quite quickly learn that "0" cost x many users is a pretty big number.

And your ideas on ISP caches are from the prehistoric ages, everything is over HTTPS, the only caches for youtube are dedicated servers given to the ISP by google.