Exactly, thank you for posting that. The "modest proposal" assumes the problem is only "seeing ads", but has nothing to offer someone who objects to being track

Exactly, thank you for posting that. The "modest proposal" assumes the problem is only "seeing ads", but has nothing to offer someone who objects to being tracked across the web. And I just want to point out, this refutes, not just the ad proposal, but the whole micropayment scheme: you can't have micropayments allocated according to the user's behavior without snarfing the user's whole browsing trail. Well here's another "modest proposal" for web advertising, which solves both problems: Site owners accept only static ads and hosts them on the site domain; users are not tracked and not annoyed by animations, noise or Flash. Then the ethical argument finally works. Ad networks would resist, but if the blocking is enough of a problem they'll have to settle for it.