The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
Exactly. If Brave delivered on what I thought they promised (an alternative compensation system for websites), I would’ve switched. I’m totally on-board with paying whatever websites would’ve made through ads to just not see the ads, and I had hoped Brave would’ve made that a thing. If Brave was based on Mozilla tech, I might even be giving them a shot right now.
But they didn’t, so Mozilla remains the least worst.
My priorities are:
- privacy
- rendering engine diversity
- open source
- performance
I used Opera for years mostly because they were on par w/ 1 and satisfied 2 and 4. Now I’m with Mozilla because they do reasonably well on all four. If Mozilla sells my personal data (violation of 1), I’d switch to something else (probably whatever KDE or GNOME ship with).
I’m totally on-board with paying whatever websites would’ve made through ads to just not see the ads.
I want to agree, but I am reluctant because many platforms want to double dip with ads and subscriptions. Not to even say that everyone wants > $10/mo for everything.
And that’s exactly why I’m dropping Netflix and Disney+. I was fine paying for them when they offered good value, but charging the same amount and adding ads rubbed me the wrong way, especially when the ad-free tier is so much higher that it’s way above the actual revenue they would be making from those ads.
So yeah, the microtransactions to replace ads is predecated on websites not abusing that system. Otherwise I’ll go back to blocking ads.
