Why Web Tracking Isn't Bad

Note that the article is from someone at the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think-tank; that it follows libertarian principles is kind of inevitable.

Despite this, I find myself agreeing with much of it: there's no such thing as a free lunch, and users are paying for "free" content and services with their personal details. It's good that more people are being made aware of this.

The obvious question is, what potentially lucrative business models involve no payment from the user but also no profiling information? I'm not sure a generally applicable one exists.

A counterpoint to Carr's anti-tracking article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870374890457541...) discussed yesterday at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585327