Can you expand on why Brave is "close to a shakedown operation"? My impression was that they were on the up-and-up. Plus, I'm all for just about effort being made to move away from the current ad economy. I'd rather pay for services directly.

I too support development of an alternative to the ad economy, but I don't support using the threat of income blocking to force a website to use a particular solution. This is in effect what Brave is doing.

Brave deprives the website owner of income by blocking or replacing ads while at the same time pushing the website owner to sign up to Brave's rewards program, which Brave generates income from, instead of ads for funding.