Brave files adtech complaint against Google

That was effectively funded by taxpayers by way of universities.

Maybe the answer is public funding for online content, but we should be clear about it. This is an economic problem, not a technical one. Federation might slice the economic problem into smaller pieces, but they still need to be paid for.

Over 600 million devices were running some form of ad-blocking software in 2017, and that was an increase of 30% from the year prior. This number keeps growing, year over year. Something has to be done.

Users who come to Brave are already blocking ads. They understand the risk involved in letting third-party software collect information about them, their person, their browsing habits, and more. Further, the risk of drive-by downloads is on the rise (or the growing popularity of crypto-jacking).

Brave blocks ads and trackers for safety and privacy reasons. But we are not so naive to miss the impact this has on well-meaning publishers. This is why we created the User Growth Pool, and the Brave Payments system. Every month we pour hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the pockets of content creators by way of BAT (Basic Attention Token) grants, distributed freely to users of the Brave browser.

But grants won't last forever, something sustainable has be erected in place of the incumbent digital advertising system. This is where Brave Ads comings into play.

For users who opt in, Brave can deliver better quality ads, without the risk of personal data leakage. We do this by using local machine-learning to understand the user better, and making local decisions as to which ads should or should not be shown, and when (the user controls all of this). Furthermore, the user gets 70% of the ad revenue for browser-private ads.

When you consider the amount of money lost to digital ad fraud each year (over $20,000,000,000 I believe), you can see how the Brave system would lead to a much better, and more sustainable future for the web.

We're not simply replacing ads. We're rescuing an industry.

At the very core it comes down to whether or not people will have always-connected device that can do simple tasks for them. Imagine a layered webs-of-trust from Layer 2 up. Person P1 can trust router R1 (the one they use at home) to accept messages for them. They follow P2, P3, P4 on this future Twitter. P2 may entrust their friend's router. To deliver messages from internet piece to internet piece you use the WoT to make sure that the packets you are sending are from trusted computers. Some institutions, like banks, say, may be more forgiving than others because they have a profit incentive, so if your home computer gets hacked they may disallow your packets for a while, but once you get a fixed computer you're off to the races again.

Forums could be done in a multitude of ways, but what you are primarily asking for is for open forums. But it isn't possible to secure an open forum. We see this over and over again as spammers push their garbage down everyones throats or gloss it up by astroturfing. We can have relative anonymity, for example, Person P1 signs trust to Alias A5. We could even use something more complicated like what Monero does, but I worry at some point it will just turn into another form of money and that is antithetical to the whole model which should harshly punish people and devices that supply trust for cash.

Anyway, I know its a bit abstract, but you could have a forum. And it could be more or less realtime (since I'm getting updates pushed to my own device) but you're right, it is way more complicated and wouldn't truly be the same thing.

I don't have any hard evidence, but I imagine most people block ads because they don't want to have to scroll past a bunch of banners and videos to read the article they want to read. Certainly there are many people who are concerned about privacy, but I don' think that's what's driving the popularity of ad blockers. At least personally I have always viewed ad blockers like DVRs for the web.