[CognitiveLens]

The important qualifier for "just driven by demand" and "People paying to have their needs satisfied" is that some demands/needs/desires are more profitable than others regardless of their long-term importance to a particular system. Just because people are willing to pay for something (e.g. a new gadget) doesn't make it more valuable than something they are not willing to pay for (e.g. clean drinking water for thousands of children). Just because the short-term-focused free market is producing economic activity that satisfies a demand doesn't mean that the system is either healthy or long-term sustainable, and that's the crux of the issue about the idealized Internet - its viability as a platform for human advancement (broadly defined) has been undermined by its corresponding suitability to support independent profit-making.