Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.

I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.

Speaking solely about news, the Internet as you knew it was unsustainable. For the first decade or so of online news, the ad-supported newspaper publishing business subsidized free online news, because they couldn’t figure out payment.

Then Google and the other ad-tech companies took the advertising dollars, and the old publishing companies took on debt to try and switch to ad-supported online publications. And failed miserably.

Then the old publishing started running out of money, and slowly switched to online first.

The remaining published are a shadow of themselves, drowning in debt, and low readership.

There are alternative models that sort of work, maybe, but they haven’t gone mainstream. They’re held back by the belief that content should be free.

If platforms like flattr had taken off then the conversation would probably be different.