A large portion of the revenue and value of high profile online businesses (e.g. Amazon, Google, Facebook) is their ability to develop consumer profiles and then accordingly target advertising and products. Those profiles are much more focused and detailed than was previously possible. This not only helps businesses, but also consumers. Consumers are less likely to see advertising that does not interest them and more likely to receive appropriate recommendations. Unfortunately, providing the information necessary for this process to occur normally means giving up privacy.
Instead of giving information to individual businesses for free, we could develop a distributed consumer profiler that will act as an anonymity layer between the consumer and applicable businesses. The consumer can control what information is accessible to the businesses. The lack of privacy concerns will provide an incentive for consumers to provide more information to the network than they would feel comfortable providing to a single business.
To implement this business model, it is likely better to create a modular application for a small market and later negotiate with larger markets, than to develop the application for all online markets without explicit agreements. Not only does this follow the model of many successful Internet businesses, but it also breaks down the aforementioned problem into similar subproblems (see: Dynamic programming). It may even be possible to sell access to the network to brick and mortar businesses.
The business model would earn revenue from subscriptions.