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\[38:59\] That gave Google a more complete model of the user, from search, through browsing to various sites that DoubleClick had cookies on or other footprint on, and Google's been integrating things ever since - YouTube's gotten big... In some way they're the web, eating their own ecosystem, but they're also getting ... |
I think you may have seen, even Chrome will now be mixing your history into the advertising model if you don't opt out, I believe. Powerful business, but it's got some downsides. Increasingly, Google and Facebook own 90 cents of every marginal ad dollar spent. Every extra ad dollar being spent this year above last year... |
Also, there's a huge privacy problem. People just don't like being tracked that way. They get retargeted by bad ads, they get creepy ads, ads that make your eyes bleed, parasite pictures, belly fat reducers, wrinkle reducers... And they get malware now. Malware is actually being placed, and has been for a few years. Th... |
There was a hospital in Southern California where all the systems in the hospital were thrown by ransomware. That gets you more on the FBI and Interpol radar, but these are criminal gangs hiding in nation-states that don't necessarily prosecute them. They're using very sophisticated exploit kits; that's the payload tha... |
The ones we know about from the last year and a half, Angler in particular, used Flash and Silverlight and Java plugin vulnerabilities. Brave turns off plugins by default. The plugins should die, Steve Jobs was right. Thoughts on music - he was right about DRM; thoughts on Flash - he was right about Flash. God bless St... |
I'm not gonna endorse everything he ever did, but he did two solid things there for the web and for security. These exploit kits now are trying browser vulnerabilities. I'm pretty sure Neutrino is the one that superseded Angler and it's trying browser vulnerabilities, because every sophisticated endpoint software is en... |
\[42:01\] These exploit kits are out there, and they're coming in through ad exchanges. How do they do it? They actually create fake ad agencies. These are fake businesses, with fake CEOs and CMOs, fake people pictures, bios, and they go and buy ads... They put custom creative ads into ad exchanges. They pay the fees t... |
Pretty soon, you don't know where those ads are coming from. They're coming from Russia, but they look like legitimate ads. And here's the crazy thing - sometimes if you scan their JavaScript, they all come with JavaScript, for tracking pixels to confirm that the ad was viewed, things like that. You don't see anything ... |
This leads to the New York Times, BBC, AOL and other top sites in late March having ransomware malvertising on their properties. If you think about it, this is actually an outrage, right? Why should world-class online publishers tolerate this? Why should they not control the quality of the ads. Why shouldn't they have ... |
\[44:48\] My favorite example, Louis Vuitton handbags on Elle.com. That takes up the bottom half of the frontpage, it looks nice, it's a trustworthy ad as far as I know - there's very little third party about it; there's some tracking... It's a custom video ad from Questra or somebody, but it's pretty legit. That's not... |
To get back to Brave, we saw this coming. We said ad blocking - even in 2015 when we started - was rising. We started May 2015. We didn't know that iOS, thanks to Tim Cook, would start making ad blocking easy to use with Safari. They make it an app install model, instead of a browser extension model. They make it conte... |
Doug Crockford knew this. If you remember Doug's work at Yahoo! with AdSafe, which was a static verifier for JavaScript and was kind of like before Google Caja, which became Secure EcmaScript, AdSafe was Doug's very picky way of trying to get Yahoo! ads not to contain malware. This has been a longstanding problem, and ... |
So advertising has become this toxic parasite system, in my opinion. It's over delegated, there's too much principal versus agent conflict of interest, there are layers of that, and along with that, there are layers of confirmation bias in the data that's extracted in the model. |
\[47:54\] They say they have great data, all these ad tech companies; they wanna go public or they wanna get bought by Oracle, and they say they have magnificent data which will increase yield. But if you look year to year, the actual performance of advertising, the so-called yield, doesn't really go up. Money just goe... |
Brave is trying to address this, but not just - I'm being very negative here - we're not just gonna cure something that's bad; we wanna make things actively better. We wanna make this anti-Google, personal Google. We want you to be in charge of your data, and that means not only should you not have bad ads or annoying ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** There's a lot of nuance in here... You talked a little bit about misperception - the problem with advertising is more than it's just a visual distraction, but it's actually harmful. Do you think that nuance transfers to potential users of Brave? Because in some ways you are becoming that publishing pl... |
**Brendan Eich:** We don't know. That's a great question. I think among the early adopters, lead users, yes they get it. A lot of them are outraged by the malvertising stories that broke this spring. And it was really great for us, because we had the late March malware on the front page of New York Times, then we had o... |
I think the lawyers - it's generally the associate GCs that join these trade groups, like Newspaper Association of America, now called The News Media Association... Newspapers have been in decades long of decline, but they view the ads as ink on paper. It's like we're sneaking up to grandma's porch and we're facing the... |
First of all, we didn't do any such thing. We only talked about how it can be better if we did something like that. Second of all, there's no ink on page ad the New York Times owns. The ads are third party, they're placed with JavaScript. Another one of my guilty legacies with JavaScript is how it's used for third part... |
\[51:02\] There's really a deep topic here. Will people appreciate it? I think mainly people appreciate speed in browsers, they appreciate safety, and we're leading with those. Safety is a broad term, but I include privacy. People say, "Oh, you can't market privacy", but you can. Snapchat built up a good cohort doing d... |
People care after a crisis. Snowden changed things for a lot of people. I think as things evolve, we'll have more concern about privacy. It's often driven by crises and revelations. People just didn't know they had a problem until they had one. So we don't need to get too detailed on the economics, but I wanted to pain... |
Brave cares about users first, and we think user attention is not fairly priced. We care about publishers, too. If you can't keep a website a going concern, the web's in trouble, so we'd like to see publishers get paid better. That's where we think, if we get the right experiments done with user opt-in and publisher op... |
It solves what's called "Wanamaker's dilemma." There's this guy Jude Wanamaker who had a chain of department stores in Philly a hundred years ago, and he is alleged to have said - at least if I can get the quote right; it's not clear if he actually said this - "My problem with advertising is half my advertising budget ... |
Theoretically, with a very private system like Brave where your data is kept on device - we don't see it on our servers, we use zero-knowledge proofs to transact things like payments for donations or ad impression counts in aggregate; theoretically, you could keep that data secure; you could keep your own Facebook, you... |
\[54:03\] That's the big idea with Brave. It goes to search too, because when you search with Google and Google does that great result - they're better than Bing, as I said; they'll probably always be better. They have the oldest data set, they have the oldest machine learning that's co-evolved with it. But what about ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a really good point to stop for our next break. When we come back, we'll dig in a bit deeper into how we can fund the web. |
**Break:** \[55:47\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** One of the things I found really interesting about sustainability issues around developing and using browsers is that a lot of these challenges are really similar to funding and sustaining open source, and a lot of your work also dovetails with figuring out ways to support content creators and publish... |
**Brendan Eich:** The story of my life. I was a Unix kernel hacker at Silicon Graphics before I ended up at Netscape, and I always worked on platform code... I think you see - it's pretty explicit now - open fintech through the Symphony Foundation and other things... You see a lot of companies realize that open source ... |
The platform code, the evolutionary kernel code that's sort of "the commons" in the best sense of the word, is a cost center. When I was at Silicon Graphics, as I developed hot, killer graphics, workstations and then high-end multi-processors and low-end desktop graphics workstation machines, eventually to be killed by... |
I see a pattern here, where open source is serving the commons, it's not serving the differentiated, risky or for-profit innovation, that for better or worse some of that stuff stays proprietary. But anything that starts to become a platform, starts to become a cost center and needs to have its costs shared if it's of ... |
\[01:00:22.27\] Newspapers have been in a decades-long decline, and they always relied on advertising and subscriptions, and subscriptions never paid for the whole thing; they were always a minority of the revenue needed to run a newspaper business, even back in the heyday, the golden age of newspapers. Because people ... |
The way I look at this is not to say "We must have advertising. Advertising is always good." There was a TV executive I heard about in the '50s who said, "It's inconceivable that television will ever be other than free and advertising-supported", and of course we have Netflix now, so never say never. Maybe the Brave do... |
Still, that's a lot of money. That's billions of dollars a year, and these companies need to get it, so how would you go about replacing that? Assume for a moment things need to be replaced as is, that we won't get a better model, we won't find fusion energy, like Sam Altman thinks would make electricity free - I kind ... |
\[01:02:56.04\] A lot of ads aren't being viewed. Facebook recently announced that its video ad metrics were off, way high from what they actually were. And they were charging accordingly, so people are kind of mad about this. But we have computers, we have smartphones; we could theoretically do a very private platform... |
We'd like to use something like Bitcoin though because we think there's a future where you have a frictionless system - no interchange charge, none of the hidden charges that are associated with the credit cards where fraud sticks the merchant with the overhead or the cost of having funds clawed back to the bank. The i... |
\[01:04:57.10\] So I think there's something coming to the web in terms of frictionless payments, whether it's Bitcoin, or Ethereum classic, or son of daughter of redhead's stepchild of both... There's something coming there, and the important properties are the permissionless property, no intermediary, frictionless pr... |
Think about the Ted Nelson's project Xanadu vision, and now think about VR if it ever takes off, or AR, because it really should be in our sunglasses. In ten years it probably will be, then all the great stuff creative people build for the augmented or virtual world - you can't really DRM it. It's a shared world, there... |
All your models and your texture art - they're gonna be out there, just like they were in Second Life. How do you protect that stuff? Well, you can watermark it; that's a traditional method, it goes back to real-world paintings and documents. That is more of an identification system for prosecuting gross copyright viol... |
Ted Nelson envisioned? People are looking at or using, or borrowing, or creative-commons-ing, meshing up some bit of art - there's a micro royalty associated to the artist. That can be automated too, and that's another thing that I think you can do with cryptocurrencies if you do them right. That should be part of the ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Totally. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I like that the way that you're talking about it too is that Brave is just a pioneer in this space, and not necessarily the only place that's going to do this. It's actually similar to how we got a lot of things in other browsers; there was always one browser that kind of lead the way, for some reaso... |
**Brendan Eich:** Yes, absolutely. And it took Firefox to restart that, because IE was on skeleton crew and Microsoft was tired of the web and wanted to go back to Windows lock-in. Yes, absolutely, it takes some innovation. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it's bold that you are experimenting with a couple of different revenue models with Brave, where you have something that's a little bit more experimental, like the micropayments, and you acknowledge it's experimental. Then you're also looking at what is working right now, where does money come... |
\[01:07:51.24\] I feel like we see that tension a lot in open source, where some really useful tools in open source - that shall not be named - are not necessarily open source themselves, because they've recognized the need to have centralized, big solutions, but then sometimes it's really okay to democratize stuff or ... |
**Brendan Eich:** Definitely. We have to experiment, but as a business we also have to figure something out, because we can't just keep raising venture capital, as Mikeal was joking earlier. And I think it should be possible to have a going concern... You mentioned where the money goes today, and it goes to ads, and ad... |
That's why we say the user should get the same revenue share we get - 50/50 between us and the user as far as the amount. It's not like we're trying to say "Only to us." We could even give it all to the user at first. At some point we have to sustain ourselves, so I'm not sure what the balance would be. We're starting ... |
That's just one idea. We have the zero knowledge proof protocol, Anonize-based protocol for confirming the ads were viewed. Because at the end of the day, all that the marketers care about is that there were millions of authentic impressions; they don't wanna identify each of those people by name. Some people do - the ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** One thing that I'd like to get to before we close out - you've made the decision to do this all open source; there's probably a lot of market reasons to continue to do all this open source. But a lot of the work that you're doing funnels into open standards and open source work. it ends up becoming t... |
**Brendan Eich:** \[01:11:15.03\] It's pretty easy. First of all, we're an ad-blocking browser, and browsers see all your browsing data in history. People wouldn't trust us if we were closed source. They'd think, "If you're talking about anything, even if it's opt-in at first (like ads), you could be spyware, you could... |
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