You can validly infer "if we're not the product we must be paying", but more realistically you'll be both paying and the product (i.e. paying a subscription and receiving ads, a la cable tv).

I think that at the end of the day, the natural order is that every entity is trying to maximize the goodness it can get, be that businesses, people, governments, churches, or any other. This is exacerbated with the fact that often it's a competition. If you don't do the level of shady shit that others are doing, you get less goodness, or even fade into irrelevance. Which is why good regulation, and culture matters a lot. Entities are powerless against systemic issues like this, the only way is to change the playing field itself.