[ndriscoll]

Consumers do pay for services (c.f. Netflix, Spotify, Steam. All are trivial to pirate but do billions in revenue). Some ad-supported services price dump onto the market, distorting it. Others are actually worthless. In any case, my point was these days computers are so absurdly powerful that the resource cost for a distributed web would be trivial. Even bargain bin low-power computers can handle millions of users.