Especially with all the numbering systems: CPU, NIC/MAC, IP, etc., it all is used to uniquely identify one point on the internet to the next. For information to travel from one place to another, each place would need to be identified. It is the very nature of the beast. Keeping logs of those connections is standard operating procedure for troubleshooting, pricing, and whatever else is deemed necessary.
Phone logs have been kept since... ever? The 70's at least. In the beginning the logs were probably the phone company keeping track of the phones connecting to their modems. With ISP's taken over by cable or any other industry, it makes sense to log all the traffic for at minimum a decent troubleshooting starting point and a cost analysis of traffic. It is a trivial step to add on to the data mining from there.
The expectation of privacy while interacting on the web through a commercial entity is naive at best. Caller ID should have tipped people off that there is no privacy except in the privacy of volume. Individuals are noise on the line in the aggregate. But if an individual endpoint is focused on, all connections become transparent.
It's just the way the internet works. In order to get information from one place to the other, each place needs to be uniquely identified by a distinct path. Logging that path is inevitable.
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