I think you miss my point slightly but in your defense I didn't make it very well. That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect

I think you miss my point slightly but in your defense I didn't make it very well. That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing. This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we don't and we sort out alternative systems. You can already see things changing with some sites putting up paywalls and some people choosing to pay or some people clicking away. It's not an easy fix in aggregate, but as an individual it's possible to make choices where the economics isn't skewing in a direction you're not happy with. The trade-off is you might not be happy to pay for what you used to get for free. Well I don't have a good answer to that other than it is what it is. Two good examples in my life at least I can think of is paying for access to Pluralsight means I'm getting high quality, in-depth, curated tech education on demand rather than scrappily piecing together random tutorials that bug me with passive aggressive "no, I don't want to become a coding ninja" ebook offers. The being I buy and read a decent amount of high quality books as the economics is structured such that they have to provide the value upfront before I'll exchange the money and the cost to produce the book is higher than just a blog post, so it's much more in-depth and Im not being sucked into anyone's marketing funnel. All personal choices but I've been saying for years now the economics of the internet is somewhat busted as it relates to information. You just have to be careful and don't be afraid to use economics to drive the quality up in your favor. Then there is stuff like Khan Academy. That's just out of this world awesome. Free and insane quality. Then again that's a case of education as infrastructure. That guy put in the work to produce that content once and it can go on teaching forever. That is the real power of the internet, but it seems that's the exception to the rule.