Facebook and Google are the monsters on the scene. Most sites make even less money. So the problem you get into isn't even the $5/month-too-many-places problem, it's the microtransaction problem, where broadly speaking the fixed costs of the transaction, both monetary and cognitive effort, exceed the value of the transaction. We haven't fixed that even in 2019, where transaction have gotten a lot cheaper than they were in 1995-ish. Hence, "alternate universe". I won't quite say it's an impossible alternate, but it sure isn't a likely one. Even if I could travel back in time with the power to mandate it in 1995, by 2000 someone would have had the bright idea of being advertising-based and it would have a very good chance of strangling the for-pay industry.

Probably more interesting is the question of what's stable in 2030. There are steps governments could theoretically take to really turn the tide of things. One of my favorites is a 1-cent-per-impression advertising tax. I am well aware of how expensive that it relative to a normal ad impression today; it's part of the point. Let the really lucrative stuff like luxury goods and mesothelioma ads continue, but kill the massive surveillance industry sprung up to wring literally .001 cents per impression more out of you at the cost of creating 80% of a ready-made police state. I think the costs the advertising industry are externalizing on to us are hard to overstate; I would quite literally and with full knowledge of what I am saying put them as on par with environmental externalities.