Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising industry. In order to do that, they were modifying an existing browser with a system that would make a payment to the sites you visited that supported accepting such a payment.

Is this what you're against, or has Brave done something else that deserves being dismissive of them?

Advertising isn't fundamentally bad for privacy, otherwise newspapers and movies would be bad for privacy; it's targeted advertising (which requires keeping a profile for each user) that is fundamentally at odds with privacy.

Well, advertisers are going to do their job as well as they can, defined by the amount of money their methods bring. They can't track in newspapers or movies because there's no feasible way to do so. If you want a business to not do something that brings it more money, you'll have to introduce legal liability that makes that something not worthwhile. That's probably GDPR, in a nutshell.

People are bitching and moaning about Mozilla pulling an extension that works around paywalls from addons.mozilla.org, so do you honestly think that people are willing to "financially support the sites they visited"?

Without hitting a paywall that can't be worked around, hell will freeze over before that happens ;-)

People would be willing to if they had a choice that wasn't "Buy a year's subscription to our newspaper to read the one article you want"

I don't think they would on their own, but Brave's efforts to ease that path still seem commendable.

If you use "rent-seeking", you need to know what it means. I do not believe that you do know what it means. Economists use "rent" to denote extraction from existing wealth. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicrent.asp

Brave adds wealth by pricing users back in from the start (via a genesis block of tokens we give to users and referring creators), and by blocking inefficient, dangerous intermediaries (cut out the middlemen, as Marx said) for a much more efficient market.

Those intermediaries are the _grands rentiers_ today, and yet all but Google, Facebook, Criteo, Amazon, and a few others are dying. Ad/tracker-blocking is a user right but it alone cannot explain the walking death of most intermediaries in the Lumascape.

Rather, too many intermediaries arbitrage and abuse data. This induces not only the ongoing rise of ad/tracker blocking by users -- it cuts off residual revenue to publishers (who make <40% off of programmatic ads in practice, sometimes <20%), who also want fewer hands in the till. Arbitrage always goes away (till next opportunity). The data misuse causes ongoing rifts and scandals. GDPR and laws like it are icing on the cake.

If you are party to the existing Lumascape of ad-tech vendors, your post is projection and I suggest looking honestly in a mirror to see "rent-seeking". If you're calling Brave rent-seeking out of some irrational animus, take a closer look at the product itself, and let's reason together.

I disagree. They have presented an alternative to the current system of surveillance capitalism without forcing anyone into their platform.

I don’t really love the browser and wish the Brave protocol was available for Firefox, but hopefully we can get there sometime in the future.

I really don't know what's better. While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge.

In the end though, I don't think we'll see a shift to people paying for their content. Societal problems arising from lack of privacy is one of those high-impact-low-probability-or-slow-to-come risks that the public is so bad at handling for their greater aggregate benefit.

To really see a change, if Brave has done their part, what'd be missing would be a general public education program that would better inform the public of what the risks are and what can be done about it. Something like Smokey Bear.

> While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge.

This feels like a false dilemma to me. Many, if not most, of the corners of the web that are devoted to disseminating knowledge are funded by means that don't involve tracking ads.

It's the entertainment corner of the web - social media, yes, but I include listicle-oriented versions of journalism here, too - that seems to be the primary engine of all this surveillance capitalism.

It's no coincidence that they also have a tendency to actively exploit the parts of human psychology that make us susceptible to addiction. Which means that, while it's true that they don't charge an up-front fee, their products do still come at a price.

I think you're right. Wikipedia (and other WikiMedia projects), MDN, StackExchange sites, wiki sites like wiki.archlinux.org, wiki.osdev.org, wiki.c2.com, public forums like lambda-the-ultimate.org or news.ycombinator.com would probably still be free. I can't think of any place that I've learned significantly from that provides their content for advertising money. They all seem to be up primarily for altruistic reasons.

EDIT: Thought of one: YouTube. I wonder, though, if the content providers I've learned most from in YouTube would have chosen not to provide if there weren't advertising options. Maybe they activate advertising because it's easy and would have uploaded regardless?

EDIT 2: The real question, though, would be if someone would be willing to make a YouTube alternative and eat the cost of development and maintenance of the site and hosting of those videos for altruistic reasons... It's a lot more costly than hosting a site that serves lightweight text.

Stack Exchange advertises, but, to the best of my knowledge, they don't engage in any tracking-based advertising, so it doesn't really bother me.

I'll even click on those ads if I'm interested (crazy, right?), which is something I scrupulously avoid doing for ads that I suspect are fueled by tracking.

> Stack Exchange advertises

Yeah, but I get the feeling that it didn't start with the purpose of advertising. Haven't really looked into its history to know for sure, though.

> I'm not really opposed to topical advertising. And I'm not even particularly opposed to targeting. Showing ads for Databricks alongside a Stack Overflow question about Apache Spark is fine by me (just so long as it isn't a popup or an auto-playing video). That's no creepier than advertising car stuff in a car magazine.

I wouldn't be opposed to tracking if that's all it ever amounted to, either. In fact, your example doesn't seem to involve tracking. Deciding what to show based on the content of the page doesn't imply using any knowledge of you from other sources.

EDIT: Anyway, what's worrying of tracking is that it makes the buying and selling of personal information a viable and profitable business. It's not worrying if you think that such a business can only be used for showing ads you're interested in everywhere you go. In fact, that's a benefit to anybody, and that's what makes it a good public justification for it by the companies that do this tracking.

However, that's not the only way people can apply your personal information. For example, businesses can also use it to personalize the prices for the products and services they offer based on indicators they bought of your purchasing power. Insurance companies can use a lot more than indicators of your purchasing power to know how to quote you, probably getting their hands on knowledge that by law they probably shouldn't be able to get their hands on to avoid unfair discrimination. There's regulations of what businesses can ask of employee candidates to avoid unfair discrimination, but they won't need to ask anymore if they can just buy the info online.

So is cURL for that matter.

What do you mean?

My understanding was that op felt by blocking trackers, ads, etc. Brave was effectively a free rider on the internet. This has always seemed weird to me since I shouldn't be obliged to run code that gets downloaded. When I use cURL (or block js, etc.) I can download just the content (usually) without all the dependencies. But I don't think this makes me a free rider.

Only a sidenote: did you think any human being can have properly reviewed webkit source code before using it?

If not, how can be anything based on webkit considered to be safe, privacy oriented etc?

Not just webkit's source code. What human being can have properly reviewed the source code of Chrome or Firefox or anything else both open and closed source before using it? How can any program any one of us is using right now be considered safe if we haven't properly reviewed it?

That's true, but at least Firefox born as FOSS so there is a community that potentially see the code growing by the time so while they may have lost something as individuals as a community there is a certain knowledge of the code. Webkit born open (KHtml, Kde's Konqueror html engine) but subsequent evolution happen inside few big companies and sources are release "en mass" so there is essentially "no community" that having at least seen the code grow a commit at a time so to have a sort of "big picture" knowledge...

I'm pretty sure that as far as lineage goes, Chrome was actually born more FOSS (KHtml) than Firefox was (Netscape). Firefox is certainly more FOSS in spirit now than Chrome has ever been, but Mozilla is certainly not immune from the kinds of shenanigans possible for any open source project that is entirely controlled by a single large organization.

Chrome's closed source though. You probably mean Chromium. Still, I'm not sure how much in the spirit of FOSS it is to have an open source version to drive development while marketing the closed source version which might be filled with spyware for all we know.

This is a pretty bad argument, as exactly the same can be said for the Servo/Firefox codebase

See above: it's true, but at least FOSS born and evolved projects may be known by "early" devs that see project evolution during it's time, on contrary when a company release million SLOC no one really know anything...

Anyway, in general my line is that all "modern browsers" must die, because browsers should be browsers, not "platforms" and websites should be hypertext, not application... I really dream a modern Plan9 even if I know nobody with enough competence, time and money to develop something like that exists today. I only can hope that a scandal and a disaster at a time we start to be tired, damaged and threatened enough that we support something like GNU/FSF to a level that produce free software and open hardware can be done by a community for the community itself... Well... A bit utopic...

> See above: it's true, but at least FOSS born and evolved projects may be known by "early" devs that see project evolution during it's time, on contrary when a company release million SLOC no one really know anything...

Do you know the history of Blink? It was forked from Webkit, which was forked from KDE's KHTML and remained open source all the way. So you argument also explains to Blink.