Newspapers: Ad-Blocking Brave Browser Is Illegal, Deceptive (2024)

Most newspaper publishers tolerate a few Internet shenanigans. In other words, there are always ways to get around various online paywalls, but the papers view this as the cost of doing business. It's hard to stop a truly determined person from accessing your content for free without mucking up the experience for everyone else.

That said, these publishers do have their limits. As theFinancial Times(Opens in a new window)reports, severalmembers of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) sent a cease and desist letter to Brave Software and its founder, Brendan Eich. Bravecreated a Web browser that allows users to replace online adswith advertising from Brave's own network. In doing so, users earn a small share of the revenues in bitcoins (15 percent), which they can spend as a micropayment to receive anad-free experience on their favorite sites for a certain amount of time.

As you might expect, the newspaper publishers aren't very thrilled about the idea.

"Your plan to use our content to sell your advertising is indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website," the notice(Opens in a new window) reads.

"Your apparent plan to permit your customers to make bitcoin 'donations' to us, and for you to donate to us some unspecified percentage of revenue you receive from the sale of your ads on our sites, cannot begin to compensate us for the loss of our ability to fund our work by displaying our own advertising. We expressly decline to participate in any way in Brave's supposed business model."

In a separate statement(Opens in a new window), NAA CEO David Chavern said "Brave's proposed business model crosses legal and ethical boundaries, and should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts, consumers, and those who value the creation of content."

Eich conteststhese claims. Ina lengthy blog post(Opens in a new window) published yesterday,he claims that Brave will not actually replace any first-party content or advertising that doesn't use any third-party tracking. More importantly, he alleges, publishers stand to make more from Brave than they would via third-party advertising anyway.

"We give the lion's share (pun intended) to websites. With our ad-share model, the default money flow directs up to 70 percent of ad revenue to site publishers – far greater than the average percentage in the current programmatic display ad ecosystem. Brave keeps 15 percent, and allows the end-user to choose whether to donate or keep their 15 percent share. Keeping their share still results in 55 percent ad rev share to site owners – beating the current average of 45 percent," he writes.

He also attacks publishers for allowing their websites to become a haven for all kinds of tracking services and, in some cases, malware distributedthrough some of the many advertising networks news sites use.

"News industry leaders rightly decry the violation of privacy inherent in some NSA or FBI tactics, yet their own complicity in tracking individuals to even more invasive degrees is not addressed," he writes.

According to a recent study from Adobe and PageFair(Opens in a new window), approximately 198 million people use ad blockers in their browsers or on their mobile devices. Globally, ad blocking has grown 41 percent in the 12 months the report analyzed.