Digital “Terms and Conditions” are the things we agree to with the click of a box and a tiny prayer that they don’t turn on us. When the same thing happens on a grand scale, it can get pretty ugly.

This week, independent artists and record labels are locked in a staring contest with Google over new terms and conditions for posting music on YouTube — The artists are names you’d recognize, including Adele and Jack White.

Molly Wood, New York Times Tech Columnist, says, “this is a story of big companies behaving badly.”

YouTube, trying to capitalize on its status as the number one place for streaming music, is starting a subscription music service. However, it is also threatening independent labels with being blocked from uploading to You Tube if they don’t license their music.

Says Wood, “For years, they [content producers] may have been bullied by movie studios, or TV studios, or record lables, and they thought they had found a safe haven in some of these digital startups, and the reality is that the behavior is looking the same.”