I’m under the impression that Google deliberately hinders their YouTube platform just because you have ad-blockers. With videos taking time to buffer, seems to signal this, because it almost makes up nearly the amount of time for when ads take if you had to watch them. So since you’re ad-blocking and they don’t like that, they’ll make your experience miserable until you want to pay their service or not use ad-block.


This is just the result of a power vacuum/imbalance left by the declining American empire. And there are many more players (the rich af Gulf countries, mainly SA and the UAE, India, Turkey) and some of them are not even nations like banking institutions, technocrats and capitalist oligarchs, and asset management firms, for example.
If I may, I think the reality of things is more like this: the world has realized that the American empire and its vassals can no longer unilaterally make the rules and force every other nation to do their bidding or face the consequences, things have changed both in the US (it’s no longer the MIC and banks deciding the direction of the country but now there are multiple conflicting groups of interest; corruption has done its thing and every part of the American empire suffers from theft at every level, the military included) and in the world as a whole and the balance of power has shifted. So, since we’re firmly in a post-American hegemony era, all that has to be decided is how this transition will be managed and what America’s new role will be in this new world. Before, the whole world belonged de facto to the West, which means ultimately America, now different nodes of power have arisen and power will be distributed between them.