That's fair, but before computers, not much was available for free. Getting a newspaper would generally cost money, as would using the payphone to communicate, as would so many other things that are now freely available. So, while its definitely a problem, as long as it's cheap enough for "most" people to afford it, then I think we aren't really regressing?

Perhaps if we consider information on the internet to be vital to daily life, a program like food stamps could be implemented? It sounds rather over engineered but it's the only idea I've ever heard for working around the "privacy is only for the wealthy" concern.

And that would get into the ethics of not allowing non wealthy people to pay with their data.