Newspapers slam ex-Mozilla CEO's new ad-blocking browser

http://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-publishers-send-cease-and-desist-to-brave-browser-2016-4?r=US&IR=T

by randomname2 • 10 years ago

37 68 10 years ago

businessinsider.com

mtgx• 10 years ago

Brendan Eich just can't seem to catch a break.

callahad• 10 years ago

To the contrary, articles like these are one hell of a break in terms of exposure for Brave.

jusben13695• 10 years ago

That is certainly true.

eveningcoffee2• 10 years ago

I must say that I have nothing against ads in general, but I am fiercely against the ads that are predatory in their nature.

This includes the ads that rely on the network of global surveillance of every web user actions in the Internet,

this includes the ads what main indention is to disrupt and control the main flow of the user who perceives the Internet mainly as the reading medium,

and obviously everything that is clearly malicious including direct malware attacks through the ad systems to the more subtle malicious attempts to market products or services that are attacking users sexual, financial or emotional integrity.

epoch1970• 10 years ago

What kind of ads aren't "predatory in their nature"?

The only kind I can think of is uncompensated word-of-mouth recommendations based on prior good experiences. But I don't really consider that "advertising", as it isn't the beneficiary itself causing this promotion to happen.

eveningcoffee2• 10 years ago

I think there is a sense of truth in what you are saying, but I think that is not completely black and white.

For example honest product advertisements can be described as non-predatory.

I also think that magazine ads are an order of less predatory compared to the TV ads because you are not forced to perceive them.

Google ads many years ago without all reaching Google Analyse and other Google whole web tracking projects were at least two orders less predatory than Google ads today.

J_Darnley• 10 years ago

Cry me a river. Publishers and ad companies deserve everything they're getting and more.

noir_lord• 10 years ago

In their current guise I couldn't agree more.

They created a corrupt model that serves them at the expense of the users and then act aggrieved when the users retaliate.

r0muald• 10 years ago

It's very odd that a letter written in purely legalese terms receives a reply that is mainly hand-waving and pointless in the remarks that are made (as if all the details given by Brave/Eich weren't already known). Doesn't strike me as particularly brilliant, but IANAL etc.

I also wonder how long until Brendan Eich is just "Brendan Eich" and not "Mozilla former CEO". I can't imagine Mozilla is very happy with being associated with a competitor, especially in a situation like this.

ZanyProgrammer• 10 years ago

Its a fact that he was the former CEO of Mozilla, regardless of what you think of his or Mozilla's actions. How can they stop him from correctly representing his past?

atomical• 10 years ago

I don't imagine Eich was very happy when he was crucified over his personal beliefs.

mikegioia3• 10 years ago

The argument against ad-blocking is that the content-creators don't get paid for their content. But, honest question: who cares!?

If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. The argument then devolves to "there won't be any good content" but I'll _gladly_ roll the dice on that world to see what we're left with.

Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value.

Gargoyle3• 10 years ago

I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value.

So you agree to stop consuming it?

mikegioia3• 10 years ago

I have absolutely no problem not consuming it. I would bet most people consume things not because they want to, but because it's there and easy.

Ask your friends this: would they still read NYT articles if they had to pay 25 cents every time they landed on a new article? Any barrier to entry for the vast majority of people would have a profound impact on what they consume.

Charge people 50 cents for a plastic bag at the bodega and they'll say they don't need the bag. Give it to them for free by default and they'll take 2!

lackbeard5• 10 years ago

That's not how the internet works. If they make something accessible over http, I'm free to consume it however I can.

jusben13695• 10 years ago

This is a challenging line of reasoning. "I provided value to you and would like to be compensated" is a pretty basic foundation of all work and providing services. There will always be people happy to write Medium posts on the weekend but that's not the same as journalism the same way me tinkering with a drone is not SpaceX.

If the content has value you read it. If it doesn't you don't.

askyourmother2• 10 years ago

I don't think the content providers have actually attempted to have that value conversation with their customers though. Why? Because if faced frankly, a lot of the content is crap, and their customers would flee if pushed to pay. Some sites, e.g. The Financial Times have managed to secure paying customers for their site, customers who value the content.

Sites that shy away from the honest conversation, with the risk their user base will walk en masse, have themselves to blame.

pessimizer• 10 years ago

Medium posts are no worse than institutional journalism. Journalism is also slightly less capital-intensive than spaceflight.

I also don't know if content has value until after I've read it, and in the case of journalism I still don't know after I've read it, I'll just get closer to knowing if it was worth anything over time and in light of corroboration.

I'd prefer that my money go to journalism based on a combination of how honest and thorough I think it is and its agreement with my own beliefs. That determination comes from a track record, and I'm not going to pay for it before I see it. That's entirely incompatible with the idea of journalism that massive conglomerates with conflicts so universal that they just have to generally support the status quo, try to propagate. I send money to journalism online that I rarely read. I read journalism online that I'd never give a penny to. I have read David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman, and George Will. I'm not paying for that.

I read plenty of stuff from people I despise. I've spent hours reading white supremacist message boards. I'm supposed to send them money or else remain wilfully ignorant of their publicly expressed opinions? Not a chance. I collect John Birch material; its material that I personally think the world would be better off if it never had been written. I should feel an ethical obligation to the authors and give them money? Let them come get it.

edit: What's being discovered is that "publishers" were actually sellers of decorated paper. Once we didn't need paper, we didn't need them; the only reason they were ever considered managers of truth is because they were extremely large dealers of very detailed paper.

TeMPOraL• 10 years ago

but that's not the same as journalism the same way me tinkering with a drone is not SpaceX.

Bad example. SpaceX is one of the few companies where a lot of people would gladly work even for free. But yeah, I see what you mean.

(Also, I wouldn't discount the knowledge of tinkerers / hobbyists - they often know much more than their peers doing the same stuff for money, because when you have such a hobby you're by definition motivated to learn and understand. A lot of tech jobs (especially programming) are done by people who were force-fed some basic education and then kind of ended up doing it because they need the money.)

Back to the main point - it's not "I provided value to you and would like to be compensated". It's: "I created something that I say will provide you value, and for a chance of taking a look at it I demand you first talk with this random salesman (who is 100% totally legit and trustworthy!)". I.e. it's asking one to at best waste their time (at worst to hurt themselves seriously) to have a chance of viewing something that may or may not be of value.

xori• 10 years ago

Yes, but I hardly consider most online news articles from these 17 sites to be "journalism" either.

mc322• 10 years ago

People who care about journalism and information dissemination care.

Yeah we could go back to a time when all you had was rumor before ad supported newspapers arrived, is that the world we want to be in where only those who want to support their view and who undertake subsidizing those views get to disseminate news and engage in journalism?

Citizen journalism is not the solution. First they may have bigger biases than professionals and they don't have an editorial board overseeing and critiquing their works, it may be more unbalanced and may have less access to the halls of power. So traditional journalism still appears to have a function.

woah4• 10 years ago

People will pay for news, as they have for the past few hundred years. All that Internet ads have gotten us is clickbait articles monetized by ads that appear to target only the very stupidest readers. One weird trick to eliminate belly fat.

danmaz74• 10 years ago

You don't want to read ad-supported content for free? Just don't read it, nobody is forcing you. But there are lots of people who want - or can only afford - that kind of content, why do you want to remove that possibility and decide for them?

wutbrodo• 10 years ago

There's always someone with the tendency to skip actually trying to understand the comments they read and just pattern-match it to something else they've heard, so I'll say this up-front: In this comment, I'm not saying that ad-blocking is morally equivalent to shoplifting.

You're making some pretty radical assertions without any attempt to justify them, so I'll draw a bit of an analogy to show why I feel like I'm missing something.

I don't see why your comment wouldn't apply almost 100% the same to shoplifting. I know the usual distinction drawn is that the marginal costs are different, but I don't really see how that's relevant: there's a (low) marginal cost to serving each page that's being lost. And anyway, the idea that the marginal cost is all that matters is beyond bizarre to me. There's a reason you buy bubble gum for more than the retailer paid for it, and it's because you're not only defraying the cost of the bubble gum to him.

If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place.

  "If retailers can't make money on goods without charging money for it, then those goods didn't need to be createdd in the first place".  What does the mode of monetization have to do with whether the goods "needed" to be created?  Isn't continual consumption of a site's content a revealed preference that pretty much by definition means that they're getting value out of it?

> Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value.

"Selling bubble gum, to me, represents a monetization strategy that says 'I made something, you want it, so I deserve to get paid' ". Again, I'm not seeing the difference in this case. The idea that something that many people choose to read has no value seems so obviously insanely wrong by definition that I must be misunderstanding you somehow.

zurn• 10 years ago

It's true that trade of physical items in the end is just a social convention. But the current legal status of bubblebum theft is based on depriving someone else of their physical property. It is not at all related to the shoplifter getting to unjustly enjoy the bubblegum.

Re both having a nonzero marginal cost: There is no consistent criminalization of wasting other people's time or money as they're trying to engage you commercially. Of course there's a separate system under which we evaluate if something is unlawful remote access of other people's computers, and I suppose that could be perverted to criminalize ad-blocking, but the sense of justice of the average citizen does not call for it.

voyou• 10 years ago

There's one pretty clear difference: the bubblegum seller isn't offering the bubblegum at no cost, so they're saying "I made something, I think you're willing to pay for it, so I deserve to get paid." The publisher of ad-supported content is saying "I made something, I don't think you're willing to pay for it, but I deserve to get paid anyway." So it's the publisher who thinks that "something that many people choose to read has no value"; they just haven't yet realised the logical consequence of this evaluation of their product is that they won't get paid for it, either.

onion2k• 10 years ago

It'd be interesting to see if that's true for very many people. As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page.

That way users who don't want to reward content creators with money from adverts would no longer see the content they're refusing to pay for. And if the content creator gives users the option to pay instead of seeing adverts then a simple direct payment would make the site work because the ad blocker would no longer block anything.

I'm actually tempted to give that a try to see what impact it has on my browsing.

azamat-bagatov• 10 years ago

Check this out:

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/its-about-ethics-in...

vr3690• 10 years ago

Oh that sounds like a good idea. It's kind of like watching a movie. You don't see it unless you buy tickets or paying too see through other media.

It would be helpful to see reviews of the content before you pay for it, like we have rotten tomatoes or imdb.

That definitely sounds like an interesting idea

hkmurakami• 10 years ago

Forbes implemented this and so far none of their articles were worth reopening in an ad block enabled browser for me.

mikegioia3• 10 years ago

As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page

That is a fantastic idea. Someone else mentioned Forbes and I just back out of their site when I see the full-page ad.

jasonkostempski• 10 years ago

I'm not sure this is what very many people would want but I'd rather know ahead of time if a link on my screen goes to a site with tracking based ads or malware and I'd like an indication on the link itself so I can choose to not even click it. I image WSJ would change it's behavior very quickly if it knew a lot of internet users never even see the WSJ name because everything that links to them is blacked out on users screens. As soon as they start just putting in old fashioned natively hosted ads, they can be removed from the list and start appearing on people's screens again. Sure, they don't get to target ads to specific users; they don't get to just drop a script in a page and collect cash; they have to do a bunch of extra work to find advertisers; and there will have to be some trust between content providers and advertisers when it comes to presenting the ads. They already have all these concerns with the print version so they should know how to handle them. They lose their free lunch but they never had an inalienable right to it in the first place. Small shops would have a much harder time getting started as well but I think it would greatly reduce garbage.

I don't really expect everyone to be willing to immediately block themselves from even seeing links to Content Provider X but I think it would benefit all users in the long run if a good chunk of people did it.

chflags• 10 years ago

Well said.

As a result of advances in technology, news, scholarly research, books, music, film, etc. can all be created and distributed by _anyone_, because it can be done at lower cost. This is bad news for some old school money-making schemes, but good news for consumers.

Perhaps consumers on the web are getting accustomed to "free" without any focus on quality. The classic arguments that lower cost means lower quality may be weakening.

Poor analogy: The computers we use today are less expensive than the ones we used in the 1980's. But who argues that they are lower quality? (I am not suggesting whether they are or not, just pointing out the arguments that people make.)

askyourmother2• 10 years ago

Businesses who expose their users to malware and harm via infected ads they choose not to screen or vet in-house, complain when those same users take steps to protect themselves.

Maybe we need to change the terminology: "I use a browser condom to prevent ad STDs from the various glory hole, sorry, glorious content, sites I frequent".

makomk2• 10 years ago

I hate to break it to you, but Brave has a nice big Limitation of Liability section in their terms of use that completely exempts them from liability for any malicious ads they might insert into web pages.

jusben13695• 10 years ago

Is his business model any different to me selling my own dish, intercepting Dishtv/satellite streams, redirecting it to my users and inserting my own ads in place of the ones already being shown?

haneefmubarak• 10 years ago

Actually, yeah, it is. A better analogy is TVs.

For years, everyone has been hooking up their own TVs (browsers) to their service (internet) and have had to watch and listen to really noisy, distracting ads that subtract from their experience (web ads that track, reduce performance, and are really distracting).

Recently, some people came up with interceptor boxes and DVRs (extensions) that let you either silence and block out ads or record what you want to watch and play it back while skipping ads. Many people loved this and started actively using them.

Now someone came up with a new TV (Eich's browser) that automatically removes ads and replaces them with quieter, less distracting ads. That's all it is.

Until today, I didn't know that Brave was available on other platforms, since I only use it on Android (it replaced an app I was previously using, link bubble). I gotta admit it's pretty decent, although it's unlikely that I'll be using it to replace my usual desktop combo of Google Chrome + uBlock Origin.

woah4• 10 years ago

It's like a TV set with a mute button.

RandomSeeded• 10 years ago

What I don't understand is how Brave expects to gain a userbase. It's a Chromium fork with an ad-blocking/replacing scheme. If a user wanted to install an adblocker, why wouldn't they simply install an adblocker which removes all ads instead of an entirely separate browser which still has ads that some third party has deemed acceptable? It's not like the Brave scheme has any moral high ground here to appeal to; it's not a unique scheme and when others have tried it it generally wasn't received well[0].

I simply can't come up with a way in which Brave wins market share.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-java...

lackbeard5• 10 years ago

Aren't they paying users a cut of the ad revenue?

reustle2• 10 years ago

Do you think advertisers are going to be that interested in paying the people looking at their ads? I just don't see how that will work in the long run.

makomk2• 10 years ago

Yeah. Traditionally, all the software that's tried this kind of ad replacement in the past has relied on tricking users into installing it by bundling it with existing software.

uw_rob3• 10 years ago

It seems that most people in the comments haven't actually read the article as the complaint seems to not be about ad-blocking but about the browser replacing ads with its own.

What would the argument for this being OK be?

Also as an aside, it seems insane to me that people are comparing the ad-blocking to having others decide what you can and cannot read, and that it is somehow a violation of advertisers freedom.

lackbeard5• 10 years ago

What would the argument for this being OK be?

It's saddening that this is even a question in anyone's mind.

Is it okay to use Lynx? curl? Is it okay to save what I downloaded with curl?

uw_rob3• 10 years ago

Of course that is ok! I believe you have the right to choose how things are displayed for you.

I however think it is morally dubious for a browser to remove ads from a site to just replace it with its own.

Lazare2• 10 years ago

What would the argument for this being OK be?

What would be the argument that it's not okay? To me your argument is like saying that it's okay to buy a book and draw on the cover with a green pen, but not okay to draw on the cover with a red pen. If I bought the book, I can modify it how I want; the colour of ink I use shouldn't matter.

uw_rob3• 10 years ago

I think the user should have the right to choose what, and how, content is displayed.

With that being said, I think it is morally dubious for a browser to inject ads. Regardless of the privacy concerns, I don't think anyone should profit at the direct costs of others.

I think your physical comparison fails as it tries to equate a right to something that is moral. And sometimes they are different.

bhickey• 10 years ago

I'd like to see a copyright attorney weigh in on the NAA's claims. There seems to be an analogy between what Brave is doing and ClearPlay/CleanFlicks. ClearPlay offers filters based on tagging offensive frames in films. Congress amended copyright law to bless this as lawful.

joesmo2• 10 years ago

Using Brave is almost as dumb as not using an ad blocker at all from a security perspective unless Eich has a plan to 100% eliminate malware, something I'd be extremely sceptical about. I don't see how his malware is going to be different from the regular malware in ads currently. Now where is the full list of newspapers because I'm interested in actively avoiding their content due to this obviously political (and extremely disgusting and greedy) move.

woah4• 10 years ago

Pretty easy. Strip all script tags from ad markup.

joesmo2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, that won't even get rid of all XSS or Javascript, so it won't work.

simeonf• 10 years ago

From the response https://www.brave.com/blogpost_4.html

Brave is not, as the NAA asserts, “replac[ing] publishers' ads on the publishers' own websites and mobile applications with Brave's own advertising.” We do not tamper with any first-party publisher content, including native ads that do not use third-party tracking.

Is this a refutation or an evasion? Does Brave replace 3rdparty tracking ads?

I fired up brave and visited a few sites - I don't see any ads at all...

NelsonMinar2• 10 years ago

The headline and post title are misleading. Brave is not an ad-blocking browser. It is an ad-replacing browser. Blocking ads is useful and ethical. Replacing ads to capture revenue is bad and unethical.

woah4• 10 years ago

It's my right to do whatever I want with the bytes I download over http. Do you disagree?

NelsonMinar2• 10 years ago

I agree. But I think it is unethical to build a business around convincing consumers to replace a content producers' revenue with its own.

michael_h• 10 years ago

It is the rich and self-righteous, who want to tell everyone else what they can and cannot read and watch and hear

That is a rich vein of irony

davidf18• 10 years ago

The advertisings must change their business model. They should follow the models used by content providers on Cable. I pay Verizon an enormous amount of money each month for the "pipe" as do others pay high fees for cellular phone providers. The content providers should get a portion of the excessively high amount of money I pay to Verizon to pay for their content.

strooper• 10 years ago

In the world of multi billion dollar ad industry literally controlling the contents in www, it is truly brave effort, or blackmailing based monetization. Remember Ad block plus whiltelisting ads after getting paid?

Newspapers slam ex-Mozilla CEO's new ad-blocking browser

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