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This reasoning violates conservation of expected evidence. You can't have "people avoid ads" and "people don't avoid ads" be evidence for the same thing.
The argument is that different people have different preferences with respect to ads. Some people don't really mind them and will accept them in exchange for cost savings. Other people hate ads and have the option to make choices to avoid them. Thus the current system allows everyone to satisfy their preferences reasonably well. A system that banned ads would only allow one of these groups to satisfy their preferences.
Replace "ads" here with "pollute the commons" and notice that the argument doesn't really change. Yes, if you pollute the commons, some people will make expenditures to avoid being harmed by the polluted commons and some will not. That doesn't justify polluting the commons.
Content produced and hosted on private platforms isn't the commons.
That's a bit of a dodge, don't you think? When everyone uses them, they are practically the commons. Youtube is a good example, having network effects so profound that no one dares even think about hosting their own video distribution website. Even the creators on there are called "Youtubers" which underlines how much they are tied to the platform.
In what way is it a dodge? It is a fact that youtube is a private platform, created by private individuals using private capital. That a bunch of people decided to hang out on it doesn't mean it becomes public property, some kind of digital squatter's rights, like if enough people hang out on my lawn it becomes a park.
To be clear, "I don't think youtube should exist" is a fine position philosophically, and not even really one I want to argue against. I use youtube pretty rarely, and the recommended videos look existentially horrifying, we should abolish youtube and twitter and reddit and whatever else is just a-ok with me. But the position being forwarded here: "Youtube should exist without ads and also I'm never going to pay for a subscription" is the kind of retard socialism that I associate much more with Bobos whose parents cut them off than with Mottizens, and I'm disappointed to find it here.
"American Higher Education as we know it should be abolished" is a strong philosophical argument, "College should be exactly the way it is now, but someone else should pay for it" is retarded. It's shoplifter ethics. Right down to the way that both sets of retard socialists use random ideological and ethical slights ("It's a big corporation!" "They discriminated against my ideology!") to justify it.
This is an inaccurate analogy. It's like if you had a big lawn that could host a billion people, and you let anyone hang out there for free, and there were certain people who were giving speeches drawing crowds of millions on your lawn, and them moving their speeches elsewhere was just prohibitively expensive for some reason such that basically no one ever did it and we laugh at the ones who tried because they all failed miserably.
I guess I should draw a distinction between private property, the commons, and a monopoly. I think it's clear that Youtube has quite the monopoly on online video distribution. The competition doesn't come even close. With their monopoly, they effectively own the commons as their private property with regards to video. In the absence of competition, how is it fair that one company gets to decide who is and isn't allowed to speak on a hugely influential platform?
I would still own the fucking lawn. It doesn't matter if my lawn is cool, or if I invite some people and not others, or if I used to let anybody on for free but now I require you to take a copy of Watchtower if you want to hang out here, it's still my lawn. If you want to come to my party, you have to agree to my terms, because it's my party.
Leaving aside whether this is a true statement or not, what does this have to do with advertising? Is the argument that because they have a monopoly, it cannot provide the service ad-supported and must rely on a subscription model?
If we want to rehash the political free speech moderation argument great, but that's a totally different "digital commons" argument than the one being made in OP, that advertising must be banned so we don't have to see it.
Actually, the two are more related than you think. A lot of Youtube's censorship decisions come from advertiser pressure. They don't want to see their brand next to a "brand risk", so Youtube decides to ban the content rather than risk losing advertisers.
I don't think arguments about who owns something is a satisfactory way to resolve questions about it being a commons. If you're arguing from a purely legal perspective, cool, but people here are talking from a moral perspective. If the water company in your area suddenly became private and had the legal right to refuse service to anyone, and they started forcing you to use certain sinks of theirs that had advertisements, would you really say that they're not polluting the commons, because it's not the commons, it's their party and you have to play by their rules?
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