Comment by WarmWash

I've been on the internet since the mid 90's, and thankfully grown up since then. People don't want to work for free, and the people who are paid to work produce far better products for far wider audiences. This is just flatly true

So having established that, repeatedly, over 30 years, it's clear that a functioning internet needs money (what a surprise) to run optimally.

You hand wave away my first point and didn't provide any examples. So please, give me a service or product with mass-market penetration (read: you can frequently find people on the street using it) that isn't ad-funded or direct payment funded. It's hard to come up with one, much less five, much less the tens of thousands that would need to exist.