YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.

500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence.

Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.

I assume you have a consumer protection agency. Ping them.

Put it in plain words. "I have been paying... they made it impossible to access stuff I paid for and made it impossible to unsubscribe."

That's textbook fraud. They'll be fined and give you your money back.

it's besides the point of the post but

> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.

I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").

There are multiple topics mentioned in this article. One is quite curious, which I had missed before, I must admit:

  Universal Music Group is currently at the center of a growing legal fight against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio, accusing them of training on copyrighted music without permission. [...] The claim is straightforward. These systems learned from real artists without paying for it, and now they can generate songs that compete with the originals

Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits.

At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.

Could not get through the article because it looks like LLM generated text squared.

But I assume people will have protections against this? One can just let their credit card company know to block out the next payment, or dispute the charges; I am assuming the user will have adequate proof that they aren't able to get to their subscription account.

While what Google is doing here is scummy, I'm assuming that multiple consumer reversals will make at least a minor dent to their financial reputation with the banks? Did this even need so much AI text?

I bet Google is training their models on videos uploaded on YouTube.

What a joke. People, start putting a license fee on your YouTube videos for AI training. Play their game.

the llm writing is so annoying

Sad story but this has been written by an LLM (to original short story has been inflated by and LLM to turn into an "article"). Speak w/ your bank and ask them to block future charges - easy.