Brendan Eich: preference

Transcript context

…Let me ask David's question a little bit more specifically, why is a private computing experience important to you personally? I mentioned this rising consciousness of privacy. How privacy is multi-sided and involves different degrees and kinds of threats. Those mattered to me, no doubt. I also think the user has to have privacy for economic advantage. Otherwise, we have no way of collective bargaining with the network powers. Any network is going to have power centers just because of network effects. Whether they collect much data or just become a successful business, they will have economic power, market power, and the users may just be these sort of sheep to be shorn of their wool. That is the model for ad tech. If users can guard their data, they can demand a higher price. They can demand better terms. They can use cryptographic protocols to transact without giving up their privacy while still giving authentic attribution or confirmation of ads viewed or purchases. What matters to the marketers if you get them on their best day is not that they track you individually. They wouldn't know what to do with these tracking databases. It's usually vendors that they hire that do it, Google, Facebook, and so on. They want to know what audience they can address. They want to know how well that audience or cohorts within it convert. They want to segment that audience and see they can do performance and growth marketing with pseudoscience, mostly regression, logistic regression. Mostly very simple statistics to see this campaign is working, this one's not, I'm going to spend more money on this and less on that. I'm going to try this new paid media approach. I'm going to try this new Brave browser private ad system because there are some users there that are off the reservation. They are not reachable, addressable. They used uBlock Origin on Chrome and now they're using Brave and I can't get to them through my usual media channels and advertising methods. I'm going to put a little money on Brave and that's how we built up the private ad business as part of Brave rewards. It uses the Basic Attention Token. That matters to me too because I always thought about economics. I was interested in it from a young age, but I also at Mozilla thought we're going to get killed by Google. I think every executive thought this at Mozilla. I'm not breaching any NDAs to say this. It was something that maybe can't be solved without really doing a second browser and marketing it as a companion to Firefox. I actually talked at one point with Dave Hyatt about doing this, but I couldn't recruit him away from Apple. I tried to get Hewitt as well. It would have been a WebKit-based Mozilla browser, but it was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed. It would undermine Firefox at some point. It would have been bad for morale. Maybe Mozilla is trapped, but I didn't want Brave to be trapped, and I certainly didn't want myself or my children to be trapped because these monopolies can last a lot longer than they should. They can really keep shearing those sheep until sheep are starving. That's happened. ly didn't want myself or my children to be trapped because these monopolies can last a lot longer than they should. They can really keep shearing those sheep until sheep are starving. That's happened. I think that's where we're headed with all the censorship and the heavy-handed interference in search results. Demonetization of YouTubers in 2015 started and it wasn't just over atrocious content that should be censored because otherwise you're going to just have people after you and you'll lose viewers. It was over all sorts of things that nobody could understand. They were just losing money as YouTube creators. These were just creators who were talking about their hobbies and they found their ad revenue going down.…

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