As you may or may not know, we have a handful of Netscape alumni working on the Brave project today :) Glad to meet another hacker from the original browser wars!

One thing that gives our users great comfort is the fact that this is an optional component. As it's baseline, Brave blocks ads and trackers. If you don't want to see them, you stick with the default, out of the box experience.

But advertising is what keeps the web open and free-to-low-cost for the masses. Walled gardens and paid subscriptions ad a high degree of friction to the industry; to much friction and you'll melt the system. Ads are a better route, for now. But ads, as we have come to know them online, are suffering greatly.

Brave's model gives the user the power to decide whether or not they participate, and to what degree. As for client-side machine learning, I suspect users today will understand the benefits better than we would have 20 years ago. In fact, Tim Cook praised the iPhone and Apple Watch for utilizing similar features (using similar terminology).

Another difference between users today and users in the early-to-mid 90's is the lived experience. In the 90's, as a Netscape user myself, I had little concern about invasive ads and trackers. Sure, we had web bugs, but not anywhere on the scale of what we have today. Today, our attention is being harvested for the profit of others. This limited commodity is being sold around every corner, and everybody but me is getting a cut.

With Brave Ads, users who opt-in to the new experience will make as much as 70% of the ad revenue (70% goes to ad-slot owner, which is the user in the case of browser-private ads). Now, you're able to enjoy the benefits of high-quality ads, the liberty of being private and secure online, and a portion of the revenues themselves.

I'd love to know more about what you pitched, from a historical perspective. I always love an inside story :)

Basically what I developed was a local engine that could use characteristics like browser history, programs installed, computer usage stats, etc. to target ads. It had a scripting language so that instructions to implement new targeting criteria to scan the computer for could be sent down without changes to the underlying software. For example, if Netscape wanted advertisers to be able to target Microsoft Office users, we would include instructions for the software to search the computer for Office and watch for future installs of it. No data ever actually left the user’s computer, as is the case with your model - the fact that they matched a given characteristic was simply stored in a local database.

Websites that wanted to place targeted ads on their site could then do so with some special markup indicating exactly what criteria they wanted to use. They could specify an almost limitless number of different creatives and corresponding targeting criteria right in their HTML. My thought was that they could pay Netscape for the privilege of enabling highly targeted ads.

The privacy downfall here, at least in Netscape’s opinion, was that sites could extrapolate whether or not someone matched the criteria by watching to see which banner their browser downloaded. I countered this by having an option for the software to download 5 or 10 other banners in random order in addition to the one that actually met the targeting criteria in the background, but that wasn’t good enough to overcome the perception of privacy issues in their eyes.

Was all of this to lie dormant until user consent was granted? Curious how that process would have looked.

At the time, clickthrough/shrink wrap license agreements were not nearly as controversial/legally questionable as they are today. My thought was to just include it in the license agreement, and give users the ability to opt out in the settings. In many ways the technology actually protected privacy, and thus I (perhaps naively) viewed it more as a privacy enhancement than something sinister that needed special permission. But given their sensitivity to the issue, had they actually implemented it, I am certain they would have at least given it its own checkbox during install.

I appreciate the walk down memory lane; curious what the web would have been had it been for something client-side like that, rather than web bugs.

Better models definitely exist, and I'm convinced Brave has proposed one with great potential. Let's catch up in 10 years to discuss this again ;)