Even if this were true, this is a talking point from the beginning of the internet when there were way less people hooked to it, why does it follow that that makes anything okay? If people won’t pay for a service it’s because they really want or need it.
You’re simply making the case that these services that no one believes useful enough to pay for are controlling everything because they’re frontends for marketing agencies. This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think it is
I use plenty of services that I do really want but as long as I don’t actually have to pay for it, I won’t pay. Do I watch Disney+ or HBO or Netflix a lot sometimes? Yes. Have I ever paid for any streaming service? God no, because I always got some friend I can bum off of. And as long as I can bum, I will continue to bum.
The only things I willingly and voluntarily pay for are news and music subscriptions and that’s because I value them the most and consider them important to society but I definitely don’t necessarily use them the most.
Anyway my only point is that it has nothing with open standards. People want free and will take advertising if it means it’s free.
I use Google News because it is, imo, the best news aggregator. If it suddenly started to cost me money, I would move to something else. Eventually I would move to OTA TV stations that pay via ad revenue. If OTA TV started charging for viewership instead of ads, I would just stop looking at news. I care, but not enough to spend money. Same with Reddit, tiktok, hn, basically everything besides video games, stack overflow (which is another statement because it might drop in quality so much if it went pay that it might not be useful anymore), and cell services+home internet.
You’re simply making the case that these services that no one believes useful enough to pay for are controlling everything because they’re frontends for marketing agencies. This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think it is