Ads and reliable counting should be possible to provide from the content providers site. Tracking/identification is optional. The question is just: if it's the only choice available, would advertisers want to pay for non-individualized ads being shown to all visitors, without any chance of click-through counts?

My guess is: initially no. But eventually? Why not? All we did then was turn web advertising into what it was from the beginning - print ads on a screen.

They would just have to agree on a common protocol for the advertiser to pass back what what each bit of ad content looks like. It wouldn't prevent programmatic buying of ads, as you could still forward over the cookies, user data, and other information submitted with request and the advertiser could still condition the ad on this information.

>What you are suggesting would cut every small company out of the advertising space.

I'm confused by your phrasing: I was suggesting a countermeasure, not mandating something that would cut people out of any market. And it would certainly be hard now, because there isn't a common interface for setting up the ad relaying, but that's exactly how thing were in the early web: having an ad provider place ads on your site required a custom[1] solution until there was a common way of doing it.

[1] sorry, "bespoke" is the hip term now...