The user and their browser decides what ads they see. Websites are not entitled to showing ads.
* lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers
* lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams
Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators.
I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.
Like, do Brave think google is just evil and that if someone else becomes the advertising behemoth things will be just rosy?
The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).
Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).
Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271