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When and why did we decide that Free was the most important consideration in media consumption and curation?

I dunno when it happened, but I understand more or less why it happened.

We were sold a false bill of goods w/r/t the ad supported internet. We were told that it was sustainable for publishers and readers. (It wasn't! It was only sustainable for Double Click/Google)

But once the promise of free and ad supported took hold, getting people to pay for information (regardless of how valuable that information was) became a very difficult task!

And, once internet connections got fast enough, lots of people embraced piracy over payment. (and, generally, those people were also the people who spent the most on media, but that's a separate conversation.)

And so we ended up in the position we're in now, where Free is the overriding concern. Folks pay for spotify and netflix, but they don't engage in a transaction. It's an auto-refill. They don't think about it. Most of them don't notice it. For them, those things are effectively free.

How do we break out of this?