Trust works differently selling electricity. At each step in the chain from generation to distribution to consumption everyone involved can easily measure what

Trust works differently selling electricity. At each step in the chain from generation to distribution to consumption everyone involved can easily measure what they're getting. This means that each entity only needs information about the entities that it buys from or sells to. With ads this sort of verification is far harder, and passing lots of information back from the browser to each party involved is the only way the industry has figured out for keeping fraud down. There's actually a weird way that control over your devices and privacy on your devices are at odds here: if your device was running signed code from the ground up, where you were given a browser and had no ability to modify anything, then we could build an ad system that leaked no information to the various ad industry companies but still let them be sure that a view was a real view and a click was a real click. But of course we do want to be able to control the software we run, and we successfully rejected trusted computing for most uses in the '00s, so instead we have all this tracking.