My immediate thought was NNTP, on which they built Usenet ... or so I thought. I checked on Wikipedia before pressing the `reply` button and discovered that Usenet started in 1980 and originally ran over something called UUCP - which was also used for early email systems?
... This is why I love Wikipedia. It teaches me new things every day.
Now if, for example, Hacker News would ask me to pay 0.001 USD to receive this specific stream of bytes, I guess that would be "capitalist internet". Perhaps it would be a good idea, who knows, I'd sure like to be paid for putting content out there for large language models to sweep in.