Do you really browse the web without an ad blocker? uBlock, Adblock, Ghostery etc. don't even try to compensate content creators. Calling Brave a bad actor is absurd.
Of course you are welcome to not use Brave, but who are you to decide whether I think my browser vender deserves my money (or attention-based money) for the services they provide? You literally said "Your browser vendor doesn't deserve a cut of the value of your attention/privacy".
I am not 100% in favor of Brave's monetization strategy, though I'm very glad they are trying something less common. If their overall execution was more to my liking, I would gladly pay them for the service. You have no business presuming to decide for other people what they find worthy of compensation.
> Curious why you think a browser company should be acting as a middle man and taking a cut of revenue from the publisher or content creator?
Well not just any browser company, but a browser company that improves the status quo and convinces me that they deserve it. In this hypothetical, the answer to your question is "because they deserve it".
The revenue usually isn't moving from me as the consumer directly to the producer, rather it is provided by advertisers who are engaged in ever escalating tactics to increase their efficiency, with little regard for me and my privacy as a consumer. With adblocking, we have two sets of people: a smaller group who browse without benefiting the advertisers who compensate the producers, and a larger group who browse while being enablers to the user-hostile privacy violating tactics used by most advertisers.
Neither of these situations is truly desirable in the long term. I don't seen any ideal solutions, and I believe that any entity which can move us towards a new and better model might be deserving of compensation, regardless of where they sit in the stream of data.
To be clear, I disagree with your use of the word "should". The world is messy and imperfect, and particularly when it comes to advertising one might say "evil". We will not be achieving utopia any time soon, so I would embrace a solution which is better than what we are currently doing, even if it is not ideal.
I don't necessarily think a browser company should have a cut of revenue, but there are lots of other middlemen that get a cut, and a lot of them could more justly be described as rent-seekers who add no value than Brave could.
It's my choice which browser I use, and if I decide to use one that pushes money in a certain direction to fund better browser software, then I don't see that anyone can really complain.
Content creators don't deserve revenue. Putting something on the internet is a voluntary action, and a voluntary agreement to pay whatever costs are incurred. Anyone who chooses to put advertisements before people's eyeballs and thoughts into people's heads is a bad actor.
