Advertisers and consumers are fundamentally opposed. Your ideal scenario is unstable because consumers will prefer true adblockers, and advertisers will prefer unblockable ads. Nobody has any reason to cooperate and whoever does so first will get eaten by the competition.
I agree that consumers and publishers (not advertisers) are opposed here, but there are also many participants who are not: browsers, regulators, industry groups. Having some people who are opposed doesn’t make solving a coordination problem impossible.
As a consumer, I’d prefer the browser to be fully on my side. As a general rule, any software that runs on my computer should be fully on my side.
Which is why I avoid using Chrome (obviously, it’s going to be on Google’s side). But I am also disappointed with all the stupid things that Brave is doing instead of fully focusing on being the most safe, the most private, the least fingerprintable web browser.
Let’s go even further: I wish I had a web browser that recognizes articles with paywalls, and does not allow me to click on links to them; there should be a “lock” icon displayed above the hyperlink.
You are free to block any ads you want.
Sites can know when ads are blocked.
I like this, but I would go further: I want to precommit to never see an ad or a paywalled article, and to make this precommitment known to the website. So the website can only choose to show me the article, or show me a standard error message “this content is not free”. (That is, my browser would either show me the article without ads, or the error message. The website would know that these are ultimately the only possible outcomes.) Best case, I’d like to know which one of these outcomes it is even before clicking the link. If the link would result in the error message, I want to see the hyperlink as unclickable.
> I am also disappointed with all the stupid things that Brave is doing instead of fully focusing on being the most safe, the most private, the least fingerprintable web browser.
If they did that, how would they fund their engineers?
Advertisers and consumers are fundamentally opposed. Your ideal scenario is unstable because consumers will prefer true adblockers, and advertisers will prefer unblockable ads. Nobody has any reason to cooperate and whoever does so first will get eaten by the competition.
I agree that consumers and publishers (not advertisers) are opposed here, but there are also many participants who are not: browsers, regulators, industry groups. Having some people who are opposed doesn’t make solving a coordination problem impossible.
As a consumer, I’d prefer the browser to be fully on my side. As a general rule, any software that runs on my computer should be fully on my side.
Which is why I avoid using Chrome (obviously, it’s going to be on Google’s side). But I am also disappointed with all the stupid things that Brave is doing instead of fully focusing on being the most safe, the most private, the least fingerprintable web browser.
Let’s go even further: I wish I had a web browser that recognizes articles with paywalls, and does not allow me to click on links to them; there should be a “lock” icon displayed above the hyperlink.
I like this, but I would go further: I want to precommit to never see an ad or a paywalled article, and to make this precommitment known to the website. So the website can only choose to show me the article, or show me a standard error message “this content is not free”. (That is, my browser would either show me the article without ads, or the error message. The website would know that these are ultimately the only possible outcomes.) Best case, I’d like to know which one of these outcomes it is even before clicking the link. If the link would result in the error message, I want to see the hyperlink as unclickable.
> I am also disappointed with all the stupid things that Brave is doing instead of fully focusing on being the most safe, the most private, the least fingerprintable web browser.
If they did that, how would they fund their engineers?