Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?

Nobody can even state that it’s actually happening “for competitive browsers” as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it’s just wild speculation and bandwagoning.

It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling if incomplete evidence and to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.

I also use FF solely and have no slowdowns on YT. I guess they like my copy of the browser.

“works fine on my machine lol” is unhelpful and useless.

It’s very well known that Google makes heavy use of a/b testing. They did it with the adblock block and they’re doing it with this