That was an interesting conversation! It's a total counterpoint to a show I listen to often about the tech industry, Techtonic with Mark Hurst on WFMU. One point that felt crucial to me was about the terms of the exchange not actually being clear-- my strong intuition is that people would be very upset actually by the terms if they understood how much their web activity is being tracked. So I don't think it's fair to portray it as if it's all fine because it's an exchange where both parties benefit, when really the users have such a different feeling about what's happening to them than what really is. You can have sensible relationships with users with the balance of funds flowing either or both ways. People could be paid for content, could pay for access, could pay a fee to give tips to one another, or a zillion other models. It seems to me that the reason we don't see any of those models is that in almost every case the amounts of money that would be fair would be very very small. There's already plenty of awesome free content, so even if a piece of content is worth paying to access it, it's probably not worth paying more than a few cents. People's random content absolutely is worth something, but also it's not mostly very special or necessary so it's not worth very much. With credit card fees putting a floor on what prices are allowed, they're forced to find a way to make it work out to free because they can't charge or pay the prices that would make sense.