The Internet is a glorified marketing platform. Its goal is to assist in the facilitation of commerce. This is done through the obvious methods (e.g., blatant ads, data collection), but also through less obvious methods as well (e.g., content marketing, native ads, donation solicitation, ideological propaganda that can then be monetized through donation solicitation, etc.). If the Internet is intended to make unbiased information widespread, then John Ohno would be right and bloat is something to actively fight against. If, however, the goal of the Internet is to get other people to read your “Call To Action” and respond to it, then Julius Koronci is correct and “bloat” is just a natural response to the need to follow “best practices” in marketing.

Tracking would make little sense if you’re simply trying to spread information widely, since it doesn’t matter who consumes your content. The reader could be an American, an Iranian, or a robot that is pretending to come from the US or Iran. Doesn’t matter. As long as the consumer of the information is properly informed by your content, the website’s job is done, and it’s up to the consumer to decide what he/she/it wants to do with that information.

But, if you’re engaging in marketing, then you want to know what the American/Iranian/Robotic consumer is doing on your website. Otherwise, how else do you know whether your content is working? Then tracking makes a whole lot of sense.

I’m not going to claim that the Internet is bad for being an marketing platform. In fact, it is this desire for marketing that has led to numerous free and semi-decent services (such as Medium and its bloat-ware 500kb JS file). But it does seem that this might be unsustainable. And the main problem of the Internet run much deeper than ads or bloat. It’s the fact that the Internet requires passive consumers for the marketers to work their magic…except that thanks to Web 2.0, we’re all marketers trying to market to each other.