In order to access the internet, a given user, must use for the most part, their Internet Service Provider (ISP), which in the scheme of things, should just be the conduit connecting people to the internet, and should not be in the business of actually monitoring, recording, and tracking the sites actually visited, but, in fact, the ISP seems to know everything about you, by virtue of seemingly tracking all that is being done by you over the internet.
For instance, if you download content, the ISP, tracks such information being so downloaded, and will, if provided appropriate notice from the content provider that content so downloaded from a specific Internet Protocol (IP) address has violated their copyright rules, will probably subject that user of the ISP, to a notice indicating that they have been identified as allegedly infringing upon a copyrighted work. This clearly indicates that your ISP really does tracks and records not only the sites that are visited but indeed the content being so downloaded.
In fact, the ISP, appears to keep track of every site visited and every keystroke so made upon that site, so that, anonymity of the user does not exist, and in fact, is tracked per their unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. In the scheme of things, there isn't a necessity for any ISP in a free country to actually track and record the sites so visited as well as the keystrokes made per site, except as a necessity in the ordinary course of business for the user to access the sites, so that, an ISP should just provide the infrastructure so that users can access the internet, and not be data collectors of such sites visited by IP addresses.
As it has been stated, information is power, and knowing a given IP address and what sites are visited, and thereby seeing everything that these users do on those sites, gives an incredible amount of inside information in regards to the individual as to who and what they really are. This, most unfortunately, is very much something that governments and businesses are only too eager to collect and have access to, for monitoring and tracking purposes, as well as for exploitation and marketing, or even more nefarious purposes.
The fundamental problem with the current structure of the ISP, and thereby having identifiable and unique IP addresses, is not that there aren't some pretty decent workarounds from such monitoring, but rather, that such workarounds should even be necessitated; over and beyond the point, that many people won't ever bother to getting around to actually doing any workarounds, whatsoever.
The greatness of America is its freedom of speech as well as its freedom of the press, of which, the monitoring and tracking of all that people do through their ISP, most definitely limits that speech and will constrain that press, all because those that do the watching and the collecting, essentially are in the catbird seat in regards to what is said and seen. Further to the point, because information collected can selectively be used against certain people or certain organizations, this thus favors those that collect, at the expense of those that are collected from.