Brendan Eich: evaluation

Transcript context

…We're going to go back and tell some of the stories of what led to Brave, but I wanted to get it in your words first. What is the Brave browser? Brave is a faster browser because it blocks all the trackers, many of which Google, its publishers, or ad buyers depend on. It's based on Chrome, the Chromium open-source code. If you're using Google Chrome—which kind of swept the market up to 70% or more of market share, 2.65 billion users they say—you should get off Chrome and you should use Brave. We tried to make something that's easy to switch to but that's much more protective of your privacy. This is an ongoing commitment on our part because it requires a lot of research and development. It requires fighting new kinds of tracking and fingerprinting that emerge. It also involves something we talked about from the beginning and we prototype in Bitcoin. That's the Basic Attention Token system for users who choose to participate in private ads that are anonymous but that pay them 70% of the revenue and that let them support their creators directly through the Basic Attention Token. That was something we wanted to do because we saw the privacy protection, which is I think every user's right, good, and necessary as nevertheless, harmful to the current system of ad tech that publishers do depend on. We wanted to get our users an option that wasn't privacy invading, let them participate in funding creators. If you don't want the private ads, you can still fund creators out of your own wallet, we wanted that feature too. It's kind of a three-sided system, which is why we use the equilateral triangle for the BAT, Basic Attention Token logo. We're trying to connect users, advertisers, and creators flexibly along all three legs of the triangle. Users who don't like ads can turn off the private ads. Users who want to earn from the private ads can then give it all back. Some users just earn and keep it, that's their right too. The problem that Brave solves is the tracking ads—the privacy invasion—because it has all sorts of bad effects I can get into. Users feel it right away. They feel the clutter, they feel the annoyance, they feel the page load delay, sometimes the mobile pages never load. This correlates to the page load problem which is too much battery use and too much data plan used by all the ad scripts in the waterfall of programmatic advertising that daisy chains from a hidden third party to a hidden third party before an ad can show up. We block all that with Brave, but once you're in Brave, there's a whole new world of economics that's user-centric. This is the really big idea of Brave. It's a user-first platform and therefore, it's built from your browser on your device out. That's where all your data feeds originate. All of them, not just the ones Google sees through its search engine or its many trackers around the web. I think it was an important realization that you had when starting Brave that all or virtually all activity stems from interacting between a user and a browser. That is because of the tremendous rise of web apps, in large part, unfortunately, to the detriment of native apps that run on a desktop operating system. That has enabled because of the ecosystem that was built around JavaScript. On the other side of things, the entire advertising, ad tracking, and digital advertising ecosystem also is built on JavaScript. I think there's an unbelievable arc to everything that you've built over the years in deciding to approach this problem the way that you have now at this point in your career.…

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