Google classroom and Google docs can not be used when YouTube is blocked

My kids are required to use Google classroom and Google docs for schoolwork and extracurricular activities. YouTube algorithms are optimized to create pointless distraction, so to improve their focus I blocked access to YouTube on their computers (with their approval even!), but now it turns out that they cannot use classroom and docs anymore!

I wonder if this is linked to something I noticed, where logging in to Google Sheets seemed to involved a redirection via a YouTube domain that was something like auth.youtube.com<p>Edit: As someone else has pointed out, it was accounts.youtube.com. Feels really weird that they&#x27;re authenticating a Google Workspace service via YouTube, even if they&#x27;re both Google properties.

Maybe I&#x27;m getting old or jaded or something but I can&#x27;t&#x2F;don&#x27;t get bent out of shape any more when I read what tech mega corps do these days.<p>Most days the story is a variant of &quot;Tech Megacorp has done a thing that clearly makes them money and tells actual people to go fuck themselves&quot;.<p>From my perspective, for the last decade at least, tech megacorps have openly and brazenly put profit before EVERYTHING! Even human life! [0]<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;raising-humans-in-digital-world&#x2F;202109&#x2F;facebook-knew-instagram-could-be-damaging-teens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;raising-humans-in-di...</a>

Is there a point of having support forums if you&#x27;re not going to have official replies to the questions posted. To me that just shows that no one cares about the product.

Someone smarter than me will pop in with better info, but when you authenticate on a Google service, it will send you through something like accounts.youtube.com. My takeaway was that they use it as an authentication service for a lot of Google products.

Maybe sit with your kid while they&#x27;re learning during the most formative years of their life instead of offloading the burden of raising a child to your DNS configuration.

Our son’s teachers set watching YouTube videos as assignments. So I had to unblock YouTube quite independently of this issue.<p>But I wonder if a workaround might be to block youtube.com and *.youtube.com but allow accounts.youtube.com as an exception? IIRC that is the only YouTube domain invoked during login to non-YouTube Google services. However, many blocking systems will not be smart enough to be able to do such a thing.

My kids&#x27; school use Google Classroom. I do block access to YouTube at `&#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts` redirecting www.youtube.com to 127.0.0.1, and it does work. But some assignments include videos and so it&#x27;s cumbersome (although it can be scripted).<p>Anyway, what I decided to do is, while keeping the technical option (and using it when necessary) is keep hammering into the kids the need to work on self control, to recognize what behavior helps them to be productive and what doesn&#x27;t. Do your job, then enjoy and also important, most of the joy is offscreen.<p>I try to use the same message on me because I can also use it A LOT OF TIMES

The linked thread doesn&#x27;t contain any information about what these people actually blocked or in what way they can&#x27;t use other Google services anymore.<p>If they blocked DNS resolution and SSO is causing trouble, like people here are speculating, then the fix is unblocking accounts.youtube.com.<p>If they blocked connections to YouTube&#x27;s IP addresses they&#x27;ve just blocked most of Google, because YouTube is served from the same (relatively small) set of IP addresses as a lot of other services.

Practical tip for parents here struggling with the problem of &#x27;distractions during school hours&#x27;: use a DNS filtering service.<p>I use the Family package from SafeDNS and I&#x27;m generally happy. It is also cheap at $20&#x2F;year. I like SafeDNS because they provide a Desktop client that prevents tampering.<p>You can configure different profiles such as &#x27;Education&#x27;, &#x27;Creative&#x27; and &#x27;Default&#x27; for different modes you want to put your child&#x27;s computer on - remotely. So during schooling hours I configure their computers to be on &#x27;Education&#x27; mode, but if they want to just do Scratch or some other brain-stimulating activity, I put it on &#x27;Creative&#x27; mode. For free time I&#x27;ll put it on Default which I&#x27;ve configure to allow YouTube.<p>I configure each profile to block preconfigured vendor-supplied site archetypes such as Videos, Gaming, Advertising, Shopping, Chat etc. I have full control over each profile type. I can also whitelist a domain if they get in a snag.<p>I&#x27;m sure there are other good DNS filtering service providers, but this one is the one that worked best for me.

We&#x27;ve long been blocking a lot of youtube domains (over certain time periods, for our childrens benefit) and have noticed that, over time, more and more issues with other google services (and even 3rd party websites) caused by that. I assume it&#x27;s down to ever tighter integration on Google&#x27;s side (rather that deliberate design to increase control over the users).

My opinion as someone who grew up without internet. We always knew certain rules for how to behave, like first finish homework before playing. I wasn’t locked into a cell to prevent me from accessing my toys in my room and my parents didn’t have to be constantly monitoring that. I think with the addictive nature of some internet sites this might be more difficult but in some ways it’s similar to the olden days. Maybe the following strategy could work for some: install a DNS logger (like pihole) and at the end of the week go over the logs of your kids computer with them. Every time they went to YouTube to watch non educational content during school hours they’ll be penalized.

Note that Google has in recent years started introducing a great complexity into people&#x27;s life.<p>Different activities (in this case, watching videos and schoolwork) are being linked. Google provides an extreme nexus for web activity and don&#x27;t provide meaningful support.<p>There is a risk of some sort developing here, between Search, Docs, Gmail and the cloud as Google becomes more entwined with the web. It&#x27;ll be interesting in 20 years to look back with benefit of hindsight and see what sort of risk it is.

The only reliable way I&#x27;ve found to block YouTube (and other things) while still allowing kid to use Google Classroom&#x2F;Hangouts&#x2F;etc is:<p>1) Use Windows 10 with Kids&#x2F;Family features 2) Switch my kid to use Edge instead of Chrome&#x2F;Chromium<p>Nr 1 allows you to block apps (e.g. Calculator, Chrome, Roblox ...) as well as websites - either completely and&#x2F;or during specific days&#x2F;times. There&#x27;s also &quot;screen time&quot; feature - both for the computer&#x2F;OS itself, as well as per application.<p>So you can allow kid to have &quot;unlimited&quot; screen time on week days between 8am and 3pm (during &quot;home&quot; school) while block all apps&#x2F;games except Edge. Then say in the afternoon allow 2 hours for Minecraft&#x2F;Roblox&#x2F;etc. Or not allow any - so when they try to launch it you get email&#x2F;notification and can allow it for the next 5&#x2F;15 minutes ... 1&#x2F;3&#x2F;8 hours.<p>Nr 2 is mostly because Chrome doesn&#x27;t care&#x2F;use Windows block&#x2F;filter rules. Luckily Edge is basically Chrome that does honor those rules.

You can use something like Blocksite or Stayfocusd extensions that are available on Chrome and Firefox.

You really need to use a MITM proxy if you want to do more granular blocking&#x2F;filtering of content. I&#x27;ve been doing that for adblocking&#x2F;style modification&#x2F;etc. for near 2 decades now.

GC is such a second rate product anyway. Lack of &#x2F; inconsistent rich text support, weird single-to-multiple newline bugs in the comments UI. Crappily inconsistent behaviour for attaching docs &#x2F; linking to docs in student work. No categorisation for “classes” eg clubs &#x2F; academic classes &#x2F; one offs for online exams. Email notifications instead of an intelligent notification centre UI on the site.<p>It’s the rock bottom level of features they could get away with and it really disappoints me. The intern that wrote it should feel proud. The multi billion $$ corporation that maintains it, should not.

Related to this, you cannot download from google drive if third party cookies are disabled.

Anyone know the official reason for Google to do this? Is there some sort of dependency on YouTube?

So how have non of these high paid software &quot;experts&quot; been able to create a virtual browser to control distant learning. Give your teachers the ability to say &quot;no&quot; by giving them the students screen and access to the lock their screen. I have no idea how I use to come here thinking you were intelligent creatures. now idea anymore.

Just on the sidenote, Google Docs is really shite.

Geez, people must be playing a lot for Google Classrooms given the amount of anger on that thread.