> One of the things "the cleverest engineers to walk the planet" would probably need to do is to increase consumers willingness to pay for good content by a factor of ~10 for e.g. online newspapers with quality journalism to be profitable, which frankly sounds near-impossible.

After more than two decades newspapers still haven't figured out that even though I want to pay for good journalism I cannot subscribe to every newspaper there is, and I am a user who actively wants to pay.

I already voluntarily pay for two newspapers and involuntarily pay for the national news-and-a-little-propaganda service. Oh, and I donate to the Guardian half the time I visit them.

If more papers allowed me to pay per view I would likely spend more money on journalism.

But I'm not going to have another subscription right now, thanks.

Not that I think their proposition is better but the Brave people particularly are trying to push a different model with their attention token scheme, so it's not that no one can think of something different, just that it's enormously hard to get people on board when the old advertisers are holding on to everyone using every single way at their disposal, legal or not.

Brave is trying to be the middleman and launching their own ad network. I think browsers forcing a business model onto publishers still isn't the right answer.

I disagree, the technical issues are relatively easy to solve, assuming there’s enough budget, buy-in. The issues with these forms of targeting are structural/cultural and AdTech is a surprisingly slow moving ship.

Technical issues are mostly used as an excuse.