Before web advertising the entire web was a "free lunch" — if by free lunch you mean individuals putting their sites up; their only compensation being some degree of joy at spreading and sharing their passion.

The early web was eccentric and kind of … "shambly", but I would not be upset if we returned to that.

The “web” has been ad infested since shortly after Netscape was introduced. Are people forgetting about the X11 pop under ads and the “punch the monkey” banner ads.

Before AI crawler web traffic for sites was less.

So now individuals putting up their sites face the risk of higher traffic fees.

No, I pay for Apple News, Slate, Stratechery, Downstream+ (podcast), Accidental Tech podcast, etc.

I donate to electoral-vote.com via Patreon. Most of my news comes from podcasts and those ads don’t bother me as much as web ads. I said I wasn’t morally opposed to them.

I don’t use any app that is ad supported without the option to pay for an ad free experience the same with streaming services.

>I don’t use any app that is ad supported without the option to pay for an ad free experience

That is, obviously, still ad-supported content...

That's not my point.

Thanks to AI crawlers the traffic costs will rise and all the sites who were ad free either need additional income, most likely ads, or will shut down.

Services like CloudFlare are offering better services all of the time to block web crawlers.