if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse.

The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.

   The worst questions to ask an engineer start with, "why can't we just..."