[DrScientist]

Ex-Mozillian Brendan Eich agrees that privacy is the battle for the future http://www.brave.com

The question is - do you need to re-write the internet economy as Brave are trying to to achieve it, and not just block trackers?

The third element is that governments are becoming addicted to the vast trove of information gathered - will they be willing to give that up if a technical/business model solution takes off.

Interesting times.

[simias]

You make it sound as if Brave does more than Firefox to provide an alternative to the Chrome quasi-monopoly. Let's not forget that Brave is a fork of Chromium in the first place which means that if you value competition Firefox is still a better bet, at least until Brave shows that they can maintain a deep fork of Chrome long term while resisting upstream changes they don't want and that's a very tall order.

I do agree that changing the internet economy would be great though, but at this point I'm not entirely sure I trust Brave to do that. They clearly want a piece of the advertising cake under the guise of "disrupting" things, but should they end up being successful I'm not yet completely convinced that it'll change things fundamentally. I'm definitely curious to see if they manage to do it though, even if it ends up as a failed experiment it will have been an interesting one.

[DrScientist]

Not saying Brave is the answer, but I think they have at least identified the right problem - ie

If, for example, an effective adblocking browser takes off, huge amounts of revenue to content providers will disappear. So content providers will start to resist in the only way they can - by blocking people with adblockers.

If you want to avoid either massive reduction of content, or the blocking of ad blockers, then you need to offer an alternative.

As I said, whether Brave's model is the right alternative is an open question - but at least they are having a go.

[stiray]

Yes, I want massive reduction of content. I am sorry, but if you haven't noticed, internet is a giant, steaming pile of garbage. Amount of usable content is 1:10000 and the reason for this are ads - you earn money regardless what crap you sell. It is no longer about content but about watching ads.

[DrScientist]

I agree with much of that - but what I worry about is the perilous state of journalism - it is being hit by reduction in ad money resulting in less depth and more pandering to people with money.

You could argue the garbage is the problem - taking ad money from better sources, however if you have a blanket ad block then there is no discrimination - the Brave model offers you a chance to discriminate but still use ad payment model.

The alternative is to move to 'pay to view' models - the problem here is that then competes with free content that is free because it's paided propaganda.

[101404]

I started using Brave recently, and so far I like it. The detailed per site settings to block stuff are great.

[catalogia]

I want no part of Brave's weird cryptoish scheme. I know the feature is opt-in, but I don't see the point in supporting an organization unable to find a source of revenue I find agreeable.

Even something as simple and obnoxious as donation nagging, like Wikipedia, seems preferable to what Brave has proposed.

[prepend]

It’s not perfect, but I like it better than the alternatives (selling user data, non profit).

Technically the browser is nice, but there’s something nice about a for profit org whose incentives are aligned with mine. For now, I use a FireFox for similar reasons, but I like Brave’s mode for the web better than the “bad ad” model that google and Facebook push.

I used to like Opera for similar reasons.

[hvis]

What could one find disgreeable in a company being a non-profit?

[luckylion]

In a "we depend on the biggest enemy of privacy for funding" kind of way?

[hvis]

Being a non-profit doesn't imply any of that.

And nobody has ever demonstrated that this ostensible "dependence" has any adverse effects on Mozilla's policy.

[luckylion]

It's hard to demonstrate anything if you don't have a control group and can't turn the thing in question on and off. Conflicts of interest are real, you don't need to demonstrate that they are, though it's not clear how much they sway Mozilla's decisions.

And you're right, the non-profit-status doesn't imply that, they could just as well do the same as a commercial enterprise. It would be more obvious that way.

Would Mozilla make the step to ship an adblocker with Firefox? It would certainly be what their users want (the most popular extension by far being uBlock Origin), but it would pretty much decrease their worth to Google to zero, hence kill the funding. And there's your conflict of interest.

[prepend]

I am a big proponent for non-profit but I think they can be risky if they are dependent on donors, especially a few donors.

Mozilla Foundation has google as it’s biggest revenue source [0], so if Google ever decides to change this it will cripple the org.

I think this would be different if revenue came from many donors so this risk would be lower.

I use FireFox and support Mozilla, but it’s challenging to donate to FireFox as Mozilla runs quite a few projects.

Nobody is perfect, but non-profits have risks like any organization.

[0] was yahoo for a while, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation

[hvis]

> if Google ever decides to change this it will cripple the org

Not really. They do have a rainy-day fund, and they have experimented with partnering with other search providers in the past (such as Microsoft, or country-local search engines like Yandex). The main reason they still use Google is that the users prefer it. But if Google decides not to pay anymore, Mozilla will survive.

[ChrisClark]

Brave is just trying a system of micropayments to support your most visited websites. To the end user, the crypto part can be invisible.

The user just deposits something like $10/month from their credit card and spreads it across their favourite websites.

They can do that and be completely ignorant that everything is running on ethereum. Which is really the way it should be in the end. Ethereum is just a hidden value transfer backend that saves a company money.

[codehalo]

Do you have a problem with Mozilla's revenue from Google?

[catalogia]

Obviously.

[Hnrobert42]

Why do you dislike Brave’s scheme?

[TuringTest]

They will still have enough of it to get their dose - default setups, corporate apps, embedded devices everywhere. They just don't need to get ALL your online behavior as they do know by default.