Watch how hard the man tries to make his 'invention' sound like a complicated idea (link).
The video relates to a very recent case and it was only made available a week ago. It should hopefully illustrate the obviousness of patents that get accepted nowadays, be them software-related or not.
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it