OK, so you walk in to a bar. The barman says, "£10 please, there's music playing that you've consumed". You chose to walk in. Unless they post a sign at the door, saying a concert is on and the price of entry then they're not (legally/morally) entitled to charge you.

The web equivalent is a paywall.

Now, bars put on free music. And you can go to them and not buy a drink regardless that the landlord puts on the music to get you to buy.

The landlord might get paid to have advertising up, like on a toilet vending machine. But me choosing not to look at it isn't morally wrong.

Arguably, even if I never buy a drink I can benefit the establishment socially.

The problem comes when the establishment not only needs pay the workers and buy the beer but also pay the breweries management and return dividend to share holders.

The web has moved to that stage where the capitalists have moved in - like large breweries owning pubs. Forums aren't run by the admins they're owned by media conglomerates, etc.. I'm really not sure it's made the web a better place.

Now, get off my lawn.

Surfing from link to link is very much the essential and original behavior of users on the web. A user often has very little idea what's behind the next click. I don't know what I'm getting behind the link, so a "show me the stuff" mentality would yield a deeply uninformed transaction, even if we were to think about every click that way. But from a founding perspective, the idea that every click is a fee-for-service proposition is not a basic tenet of the web or a reasonable assumption to be made of every user.

Lets be honest, a link is just an attempt to catch a fish.

Is a fish obligated to swallow a hook that is cast into the ocean?? No reasonable fisherman would think this.