Brave Is Interesting But Ad-Blockers Are Better For The Web

January 26th, 2016Dan Yoder

Brendan Eich’s latest venture is Brave, a browser platform that blocks ads and trackers while encouraging people to pay for content. Brendan has done a lot for the Open Web, founding Mozilla at a time when Microsoft was threatening to turn the Web into a proprietary technology, and working all the while to improve JavaScript. And I don’t doubt that his latest venture is equally well-intentioned:

The Web is always in trouble for some reason or other. I remember when Microsoft came after Netscape and threatened to lock Web standards into IE. Only the Web is so big, with such reach to billions of users, that no one owns it. This means it will always be contested ground.

But the Web today faces a primal threat.

Some say the threat to the Web is “mobile”, but the Web is co-evolving with smartphones, not going away. Webviews are commonplace in apps, and no publisher of note is about to replace its primary website with a walled-garden equivalent. Nor can most websites hope to develop their own apps and convert their browser users to app-only users.

I contend that the threat we face is ancient and, at bottom, human. Some call it advertising, others privacy. I view it as the Principal-Agent conflict of interest woven into the fabric of the Web.

The Browser As An Advertising Channel?

Brave’s solution is to build ad-blocking technology directly into the browser. Their browser will provide it’s own ad network for “safe” ads.

Brave browsers block everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising “dirty pipe”, impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don’t have to suffer, even a few canaries per screen size-profile, with ad delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie.

And if you want to go ad-free for your favorite sites, you can, or, at least, you’ll be able to eventually.

Or A Cynical Way To Divert Ad Revenue?

The problem is that advertising corrupts. Blocking ads and trackers is great. But I want to leave it at that, not simply introduce another ad network. Put another way, I don’t buy one of the fundamental assumptions Brendan is making about the Web:

Once you grant this premise, that the Web needs ads in the large, it follows that your browsing habits will be surveilled, to the best of the ad ecosystem players’ abilities.

Goodness, no. The Web does not need ads in the large. And we certainly don’t need to surrender our privacy to have it. In fact, if anything, this is exactly backwards. Advertisers need the Web, not the other way around. And the Web itself, which is by nature decentralized, has just as much potential to enhance our privacy as to compromise it.

Eich goes on to say:

With enough people blocking ads, the Web’s main funding model is in jeopardy.

This is so wrong that I’m almost shocked that someone with Brendan Eich’s background would make such a statement.

To begin with, the emergence of the Web owed nothing to advertising. And its subsequent growth has as much to do with e-commerce and other services as it does advertising. And we’ve already talked about the myth that people won’t pay for content.

Brave Is A Dead End

Maybe Brave will ultimately be successful in getting more people to pay for content. But given their stated assumptions, it seems at least as likely that their role as a advertising channel will erode their incentives for doing so. (Which is not to impugne Eich’s motives, but he’s not the only one involved.)

We already have ad-blockers that work well. We’re empowered to disable them for sites that we choose. This already forces content providers to make difficult choices:

• They can effectively declare war on their audience, degrading their experience and gradually driving them away (or into the waiting arms of ad-blockers.).

• They can live with the slim margins provided by less intrusive display ads.

• They can encourage their audience to pay for their content (which means producing unique, quality content people are willing to pay for, as opposed to most of the content we have now).

Sorry, but this hardly seems like a problem at all to me, let alone a crisis that threatens the “Web’s funding model.”

Getting people to pay for quality content is the best possible outcome. It aligns publishers’ interests with those of consumers. That may be a painful transition for some publishers, and even impossible for others. But to see it as a threat to the Web itself is ludicrous, given its history and economic diversity.

The Web needed Mozilla. But I don’t think it needs Brave.