Another related problem is the pathological economy of kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made some sense to offer a small finders fee fo

Another related problem is the pathological economy of kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made some sense to offer a small finders fee for referring traffic that bought something---you were connecting someone with a service they needed but couldn't easily find online since the search engines were not very good. Now it would be trivially easy to find almost any online service if those services weren't deliberately obfuscated by a jungle of middlemen trying to be the one that snags the referral fee.