[mkr-hn]

There seem to be three broad generations--by adoption, weakly correlated with age--of internet-savvy people.

1: People who were very active in the BBS/Usenet days and saw the emergence of the public Internet and web.

2: People (like me) who mainly got on when the .com bubble was warming up. People in 1 and 2 saw or even had these complaints, and had plenty of skepticism about ad driven models when they emerged with the growing realization at Google and other surviving web companies that ads and data mining could save them after the crash.

3: People who only know the internet after that. Who never knew a time when the internet was such a big, new thing that people still capitalized the word.

I think most of the people who complain about companies charging for stuff are in 3 and never knew what we lost when ad-funded silos pushed everything else out. It doesn't help that a lot of them are, along with 2 and even 1, struggling to make enough money to survive with so many jobs turned into SaaS or taken over by big outsourcing firms that don't need as many people.