Why Our Chrome Extension Has Been Banned (And The Case Against Corporatist Internet Browsers) Savieo Follow Dec 11, 2017 · 4 min read

tl;dr Our little (cute!) browser extension for Chrome has been banned by Google because their Terms of Service begins where your browser usage ends.

Firstly, we want to apologize to everyone (all ~350 of you!) who were using our Chrome Extension and wondering why it disappeared all of a sudden. 😟

Apparently our extension upset the folks at Google and they decided to ban it since it violated their Terms of Service, particularly:

We don’t allow products or services that encourage, facilitate, or

enable the unauthorized access or download from YouTube.

Of course we were surprised to read this (more on that later), not because our extension had been in use for over a year now, nor that it was approved when we submitted it through their developer portal, no, it’s because it literally does what a regular browser bookmarklet would do.

Maybe they didn’t like us using this “infamous” YouTuber in our screenshots (sorry Pewds!) 😎

In case you’re unfamiliar with what a bookmarklet is, in our case, it’s simply a small piece of Javascript code that lives in your browser’s bookmarks and opens the current browser window’s url on our website when clicked.

That’s it. Our extension doesn’t “facilitate” anything other than a click that opens our website with a url. Again, just like one of those bookmarklets.

When we responded asking for further clarification we were ignored, we never got clear direction as to what we were actually infringing on in terms of our code and its functionality. All we got were annoying automated responses citing the ToS violation above.

B-but you encourage unauthorized access to YouTube!!! 😫

Okay! We hear you! But that raises even more questions. Questions that we wanted answers to and were also conveniently ignored.

What constitutes encouragement? How can an add-on on a browser that lets you navigate the Open Web be considered encouragement? And if that is indeed encouragement, what about all the other ways Google and their myriad of products “encourage encouragement?”. 😐

Am I able to use their Google Search product and search for “YouTube downloader” and get thousands of results for websites that “encourage” the downloading of videos from YouTube?

What about Google Docs? Gmail? GSuite? Am I able to email my friend a link to our website that lets them download their video from YouTube? Does this mean Google is encouraging and facilitating my usage?

And what about Google Cloud? Can we host our website on their servers? Doesn’t this constitute Google encouraging the encouragement of those that encourage the downloading of YouTube videos? 🤓

Why stop there! What about Google Fiber!

Hey you! It’s not about encouraging! It’s that its unauthorized! 😡

Well, it might be “unauthorized” from Google’s perspective but it’s certainly not unauthorized from an Internet usage perspective. Not at all.

Also, in case you think that what we’re doing is somehow illegal, let us remind you that it isn’t. Savieo is essentially a scraping service, that’s what we do. We scrape the Web and thankfully that’s still not illegal (no matter how much the Corporate Internet wants to change that), yet. Remember, this is also what Google Search does (in case you were wondering 😜).

However, there’s another issue at hand here. Why just YouTube? What about Vidme? Dailymotion? Vimeo? All the others? If Google is so concerned about the “unauthorized access” of videos on the Web why just focus on YouTube? Surely they should forbid the usage of our extension that “encourages unauthorized access” of those websites as well, right? 🙃

Well no. They don’t care about all those websites, they’re fine. All we have to do is remove the “encouragement” of YouTube downloads from our extension and Google will reinstate it.

Isn’t that interesting.

Chrome has gotten to big for the web and you can eat cake 🍰

The thing of it is, Google doesn’t give a damn about its competitors’ websites, the Open Web, or anything else that doesn’t serve its best interests.

This was the sole reason for Google making a web browser in the first place, and why the Browser Wars were and are so important; it’s their way to control access to the Web on their terms not yours. It’s their Trojan House. 🎠

We also have to understand why this is happening now.

Current global browser stats as of Nov 2017 from w3counter and yeah it’s rising month-on-month 😟

The only reason Google feels secure in its ability to enforce a rule that is so self-serving is because Chrome now has a massive majority share of all web usage today — and it’s growing.

Of course it wasn’t always like this. When Chrome was in its infancy, Google did everything it could to position itself as a developer-friendly web browser that just wanted to make the Web “a better place”.

But just like all major tech companies that like to play the friendly underdog, when they reach dominance the pivot comes and their true intentions are revealed — users be damned.

Think of this. What do you think would happen if one of Google’s other products became ubiquitous with a near monopolistic position?

Or, do you think Google would ban us if Chrome usage was only ~15% and far below the others?

We think not.