Email, uucp, nntp, and irc were basically funded by the users of the systems since it was primarily P2P systems operated by the ISPs. Most/many ISPs had local

Email, uucp, nntp, and irc were basically funded by the users of the systems since it was primarily P2P systems operated by the ISPs. Most/many ISPs had local ftp mirrors of useful software, and of course provided the first http hosting. The Internet and the web could have grown in this way indefinitely with large e-commerce sites paying their ISPs proportionally more for traffic but reaping the benefits of not maintaining brick and mortar storefronts. The first search engines had no ads. They were public services to a large extent. Modern Google is a distributed crawler/indexer and inverted search tree for queries (last I heard). Something quite similar could have been built and sharded across ISPs. DNS is still ad-free, supported only by the ISPs and Registrars that benefit from it. So is email. The PKI is free again. BitTorrent or ipfs could localize the costs of content distribution if media companies weren't bamboozled by DRM.