For those of us old enough to remember life pre-Internet, with hindsight we should have realized the end result of all of this. Back then, we were enamored of the very idea of instantaneous, wide-spread communication and the enormous potential of this new connectivity. Even in the dial-up era, things like email and message boards/file downloads were transformative experiences. We sort of just assumed that the only barrier was physical connection; have modem, will travel.
We forgot TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. From the very beginning, the Internet wasn't free. Starting I guess with the early DARPA stuff and then the contributions of universities and various groups experimenting with things, someone was paying for it. We thought for a while hourly fees for games or profits from selling stuff (porn, probably) might do it, but we were fooling ourselves. The one thing that has always been a constant with the Internet has been information, particularly data about who is using it and the stuff they are using it for. We should have realized that the only viable long-term monetization strategy (barring turning it all into a government controlled thing, which no one wanted for good reasons) was selling that data.
In the early-middle period, late nineties say, when I was among other things the web editor for a print magazine's online edition in addition to my print duties, we were big into advertising revenue. That turned out to be pretty much chimerical, though. Eyeballs on banner ads did not turn into sales for the advertisers, and clicks did not equal profits. Eventually, most websites realized that selling the data of their readers was far more profitable, directly or indirectly.
So, yeah, we reap what we sow.