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To be fair, large-scale corporatization does take a while. Social Security numbers were issued with the staunch vow that they would never be used as personal identification for anything but your Social Security funds, and the people who feared it would lead to a nationwide ID system, which would then lead to tracking of our finances and the ability to steal someone's identity--they were called Chicken Littles, too. They were 100% right, but it took about 40 years before their predictions came true, and by then no one cared.
That's what this will be. In forty years we will all be paying for website bundles from our service providers--I bet they'll even call the lowest tier "basic" just like "basic cable"--and we'll just be cool with it because the progression was slow and that's how it is. And I don't even know if it's a bad thing, or if there was ever really a chance of avoiding it in the long run anyway. It wouldn't hurt for us to swing at least a little back toward a model where people expect to pay for quality information. But I'm 100% confident that there will come a day, before the two of us die, where websites are blocked by service providers and there is a complex but completely legal process by which CNN and AT&T have to negotiate over how much of AT&T's "news bundle subscription" price will be passed on to CNN--just like Netflix/Hulu/Amazon currently pay their content creators and demand exclusivity in certain contracts.
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