[lern_too_spel]

> But that's essentially was Google is doing: dictating things unilaterally

Nonsense. The publishers agreed to sell their inventory to Google, just as the movie studios agreed to license their content to Netflix or sell it on DVD.

Everything else from your post stems from this fundamental misunderstanding about how publishers monetize their content.

> That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.

Then it's ethical for Brave to monetize The Guardian's content. It is not ethical for it to monetize everybody else's. The same with a piracy service. If a piracy service resells content it has an agreement from the owner to resell, that's kosher. It doesn't mean that it also gets to resell everybody else's content.

> Do you work for some big ad-tech company?

No. I'm just not stupid enough to accept Eich's stupid output.

[user812]

Brave does not monetize content. Everything that is monetized goes to the wallets of publishers, minus a fee.

Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free. Consequently there isn't a licence involved, in contrast to your movie example. The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.

[lern_too_spel]

> Brave does not monetize content. Everything that is monetized goes to the wallets of publishers, minus a fee [emphasis added].

Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence.

> Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free.

They have spots on their web pages for advertisements that they sell to Google or other ad networks. Brave unilaterally takes those spots from the publisher for a price the publisher never agreed to.

> The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.

That's the point. They sold that inventory to Google, not to Brave.

[user812]

Well, after all it's called user-agent, not publisher-agent ;)

[tannhaeuser]

> everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free

No it's not, at least in the EU as of last month's copyright reform. Meaning aggregator and search sites need to pay royalties for syndicating significant portions to publishers. That it's technically possible to scrape content doesn't mean scraping doesn't run afoul of copyright legislation and press norms such as proper attribution. You could also technically "scrape" written books; yet re-publishing your own book copies isn't considered legal.

[user812]

The copyright reform doesn't affect user agents.

Besides, it isn't even in effect yet.