Dear NewPipe community and other beloved creatures, You might have already noticed this: Searching “NewPipe” via Google will yield plenty information about the project, but a link to the official website is missing. This is because Google submitted to a DMCA takedown notice from a French record label, “Because Music”. The notice demands removing our homepage newpipe.net from their search listings along with a set of other domains completely unrelated to our project. The DMCA takedown notice was published in the Lumen database by Google themselves. While worse things could have happened as the result of such a takedown request, Google’s unlisting of our homepage creates a variety of problems. Given the fact that Google no longer counts visits to our site, it will lose relevance. As a result, websites for fake clones of NewPipe that mimic our homepage will tend to rank higher in the results. This could ultimately cause users to fall for such scams. The team is currently discussing what to do about the situation. We are considering taking legal action. If you are a lawyer and have experience with this and would like to help us, please contact us via email (team(at)newpipe.net). Regards, Schabi
Because, frankly, my Google account is full of 17 years and counting of excellent user data. They have my past trends but if they expect to keep mining me for data in the future then they better let me keep using my adblockers. Go ahead, ban me, I’ll call yer fuckin’ bluff mate. I’ll be off the grid faster than they can say “please deactivate ublock”. I only still use Google because it’s convenient and because I have so much of my life and history tied up in it, but every day that I use it I think about how I shouldn’t. If they want to burn that bridge, it’ll be highly effective and I’ll never come back.
And I think a lot of people are in the same boat these days. Of course you’ll always have your “normies”, your simple majority who while they may hate the ads don’t even know what an ad blocker is and will just put up with whatever Google does in order to get their youtubes. But if you piss off a nerd we have options. We’ll build our own social network empire, with blackjack and hookers. We’ll jump ship to a search engine that gives a damn about the user. We’ll host our own email domains. We’ll build newer, better ad blockers, that Google can’t even detect.
If Google truly wants to fuck around like that they may well just find out, just like reddit is doing.