Google and Facebook Too Can Be Disrupted

I have long considered today's internet advertising model a scam: It's a system in which giant, monopolistic companies -- Google and Facebook -- are selling inflated user numbers and overhyped targeting opportunities to advertisers while collecting way too much information about users and cheating content creators out of their fair share of revenue. It may not be too late to fix it, though. Just ask Brendan Eich, founder and chief executive officer of Brave Software, a San Francisco-based startup whose attempt to change the standards could be considered quixotic if not for Eich's track record.

Eich created the JavaScript programming language while working for Netscape, and then co-founded the Mozilla project, which developed the Firefox browser. He had to leave Mozilla for reasons that had nothing to do with his vision or technical prowess. His current company makes a browser, too, but it's different from others in that it prevents sites from tracking a user and blocks ads, while also bypassing the anti-ad-blocker protection used by major news sites. I've tried it and it works better than the ad-blockers in other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari. The browser is built on Google's open-source Chromium code, and its usage isn't tracked by browser market share statistics: It shows up as Chrome. "We hide in the Chrome crowd," as Eich put it to me in a conversation on the Telegram messenger. That must come in handy for a product that undermines the business model of most top websites its users visit: It's difficult to block.