A site can serve ads without tracking (and the banner) - the ads just couldn't be targeted at individuals. Instead they'd have to guess what ad was appropriate ("Rolling Stone" could serve everybody ads for Taylor Swift's latest album without a banner, etc).

>> A site can serve ads without tracking (and the banner) - the ads just couldn't be targeted at individuals.

The biggest problem with online advertising is not tracking users. It's a lack of trust between advertisers and pretty much everyone else. If you're going to pay for an ad, you want to be sure it was seen by a real person. I'm not sure that's the concern any more because click-through is more important than "seeing" an ad. Regardless, the goals are to make sure it's easy for a given advertiser to get on many web sites, easy for a site to get ads, and also possible to prevent fraud since there will obviously be multiple parties involved.

I suspect tracking users was an offshoot of just verifying that users were real to prevent fraud in the ad world. Not saying any of it is OK, but it seems like the way to prevent tracking is to find a way to verify authenticity while also preserving privacy.

Embedded banner ads with a third party sampling the site to see that ads are fairly displayed according to paid quota. Maybe something like that?

> ("Rolling Stone" could serve everybody ads for Taylor Swift's latest album without a banner, etc).

And that would be fine, as long as Swift was willing to pay for it. But the tracking and personalized ads thing was a numbers game; personalized ads have a higher conversion rate, thus are more valuable, thus we need data to personalize ads.

This means you get less money for it and can't survive due to the lesser revenue.

This is contrafactual. Many things survived on exact that model before hyper targetted ads. And besides, with targetted ads the middle men take most of the cut.

This is incorrect as companies will pay less for ads that convert less.

And not surviving would.be the best outcome in a large number of cases.

Yes, we all know how great countries with no free media do.

Absolute dreams.

There's no free media. It's propaganda from all sides. And I suspect it always was like that.

Biased or not, it's still useful and need to be free.

That was your choice in the end, but this was the problem - people didn't have the choice, or the awareness. The EU law fixed this, but instead of corporations going "Hmm, maybe we shouldn't track users", they instead went with malicious compliance and implemented annoyances - because data is more valuable for a lot of websites than whatever said website is peddling.

"I would like website operators to assume that I consent to being tracked, so I'm annoyed that website operators are not allowed to assume that everybody consents to being tracked."