Collectively it's untenable for a single for-profit entity to hold highly personal information on billions of people from all over the world and have a direct, immediate communication channel open to them. These companies have immense power and they need to be brought under control.
>For instance, a site like Oxford Reference can charge between 25 to 99 cents for access to a single page of content
I want something entirely different. I want to pay what google makes on me watching ads (or 2x that, I don't care), and distribute that to people creating content I watch without me interfering on that process. Essentially, what happens when I listen to music on Spotify.
To make it a mandatory system is a whole other issue.
It's true that people will probably still only pay for things that provide them significant value, but a) low-value content is one of the biggest problems on the internet, so putting those companies out of business is a great result as far as I am concerned, and b) search is obviously high value content, so Google has nothing to worry about.
Google have been very concerned about lack of diversity on their profitable business portfolio and this was a seemingly promising idea at the moment, so they actually tried that idea and miserably failed. People don't want to pay a single cent to publishers unless there's a significant value delivered (like music, movie subscriptions) while the majority is okay with using their privacy as currency. If you have a viable proposal on a "micropayment" business, go try and become the next tech giant.