Google mines everything you do online for sellable personal data and metrics, and also has managed to work its way into a position to almost unilaterally dictate global web standards today so as to benefit its own business interests and disadvantage anyone who even thinks about challenging its unique power and authority in this arena. At the user level, the way this impacts you is, it's more or less impossible (or at the very least so incredibly impractical and inconvenient that 99% of people who try will give up at least partially) to access the web in any way other than the way Google thinks you ought - which is, naturally, the way that lets Google make the most money off of you. It makes this happen by way of enforcing rules and standards with Chromium, which the vast majority of web browsers are made from, and by being the largest financial contributor to Firefox, the only non-Chromium desktop browser with any appreciable market share. Apple's Safari browser also has substantial market share in the mobile market, but it has achieved this by (much like Google) making it nearly impossible to use any other browser except for Safari on the iPhone, all 'alternative' browsers there effectively having to be just reskins of Safari.
But blah blah blah, you guys know all this already. Long story short: opposing or just plain not cooperating with Google in any way that you can, even in little seemingly insignificant ways, is probably the closest we internet users can get nowadays to an unalloyed good. Sooooome of us might say "moral imperative", but I dunno, some others might consider than being dramatic, heh.
Anyways to that end, a few months ago famous tech YouTube channel LinusTechTips posted a video called "De-Google Your Life Part 1", which explained non-Google alternatives for browsers, email service, search engines, DNS, and some other things. I thought I'd posted it when it came out, but I guess I didn't, so you can watch it here:
Well, just a week or so ago, LTT came out with "De-Google Your Life Part 2", which explained alternatives to even more Google services, including non-YouTube sources for watching videos, as well as ways you can watch YouTube without seeing ads, in the face of Google taking some recent draconian steps to defeat adblockers (again, with help from their complete control over Chromium).
But I can't show you their video, because YouTube took it down. It's the first and only time in their like ten years of existence that LinusTechTips, a powerhouse revenue-generating channel with almost 16 million subscribers, has ever had a video removed by YouTube for a content violation.
So you'll have to watch this re-upload of it on a different channel instead. Don't tell Uncle Scrooge.
