I'd argue that people have been taught to expect it to be free. When fundamental services like search, email, chat, etc. are provided to consumers for free, why

I'd argue that people have been taught to expect it to be free. When fundamental services like search, email, chat, etc. are provided to consumers for free, why shouldn't other services be free too? Of course we know these services aren't really free; Google and Facebook still run their services on physical servers that have hosting costs. But by making their apps free and finding alternative revenue streams (i.e. selling data), they can set norms that harm competitors with less capital while making it easier to adopt new users (and collect more data).