Citation required.

Not one Ad was required for the Internet to be useful. Hell, the WWW started as a bunch of hobbyists sharing info about what they liked. Google's killer product their search index. Not Ads.

I don't need to pay anyone for me to host something aside from the domain name, and a connection to an ISP. I just have to want to host it. The rest of the world at some point decided the Net MUST be monetized. Cookies came soon after, then JS, then all the familiar trappings of the web as a monetized medium.

Note; it becomes relevant for scaling or platforming to be able to be paid, but evven then, there are other ways to do that besides selling everyone else's privacy, comings and goings, etc.

Once you add money to something, you lose anonymity and safety from surveillance. No one would care one iota about what went on in Cyberspce if there wasn't a buck to be made.

I miss those days so horribly. Information shared and organized for it's own sake...