I don't think you understand the web at all dude.
Yahoo a year a year or two ago was hacked and lost 750+ million email accounts and that data. Everybody said it was the largest data breach in history. Wrong.
Google SELLS more than that in 1 day. It's the biggest data breach in history and is still ongoing. They have been under investigation since 2018. Google has a highest bidder algorithm that sells data. Google owns virtually every aspect of the Web. Google Analytics is present in 85% of all websites. Tracking your every millisecond. Where you are, where you are in the web, how long you are on a page, etc. It's endless. That is what is involved in ads. It's a data breach and a breach in privacy. Just using the web you are earning Google money. Whether they get activated or blocked you still earn both parties money. Preventing them from tracking you is important and not extortion. The web has been built to systematically serve 1 company and they know almost everything about billions of people. I've studied web development for a year now preparing for a JR developer role and knowing what I know about how sophisticated the web is for Google, it's preventing extortion. NOT making extortion. You reward creators for not selling you out. It's a tip to say thanks for caring and not selling my data to the highest bidder.
Just as further tip note. The W3C, people who are in charge of the web, don't approve of many things Google does, they try to make everything privacy focused like Brave and FF. Google is just so big they don't care. Google hardly has any physical products yet is one the richest companies in the world. You think ad blocking hurts them much? Nope.
I understand the point that you are trying to make. Brave seems to have a good model and Google's control over the internet is concerning, but there are several ways to look at this.
You're looking at the internet giant Google, I'm looking at the small guy, the person that ad blockers actually hurt.
As I said above, you do whatever your morals will let you. If that means using Brave to challenge Google's data collection, then do that. I'm just saying that I wouldn't feel good taking away revenue from sites by circumventing their chosen revenue stream.
You do raise a good points with regards to alternative revenue streams. Albeit unintentionally. This may be something that I'll need to discuss with Tom.
I'm not here to argue, or to claim I understand the web, I'm just sharing my personal convictions on ad-blocking.
The creators are Brave aren't con artists, but they are circumventing the chosen revenue sources of websites without giving guarantees of revenue. Yes, there is the opportunity to generate income, but it relies on a cryptocurrency model and adds a lot of complexity to proceedings.
Anyway, this is not a productive conversation. We are both talking about different matters and this thread is supposed to be about Edge. I do not plan to post further on this.