[aeorgnoieang]

Wikipedia and archive.org are supported by donations. That is possible for an image hosting site/service.

"blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC" are all paid by someone and all tho their are free hosts for them (or similar services), a lot of people are perfectly fine paying for them and otherwise seem mostly content "to participate in or contribute to surveillance". I'm fine with that too.

But it's very much always been "the way the Internet used to be" to pay for things you value sufficiently. Someone has always paid for everything and gift economies are inherently limited. They're also much harder now than when the Internet was younger.

Academia also seems like a poor example of 'the gift economy spirit'. They're struggling to live up to that spirit badly enough that it's disingenuous to suggest it as something to emulate.