Apologies in advance for the fisking..
I can sort of see why people would think that monetizing the Internet was a new concept, but seriously how does everyone think a web business can run without an income source?
I emigrated to the US in the 90s to ride the dotcom wave and came home in the mid 00s, a couple of years after it all collapsed in on itself. A lot of IT staff got hired and got paid, some of them for several contiguous years. Pretty much everyone I worked with who was involved would agree that the internet was a tremendous success.
Of course a lot of investors would argue that it was a disaster, but having gawped open-mouthed the alacrity with which investors threw money at ludicrous concepts they had absolutely no grasp of, it's difficult for me to feel much pity.
But then, importantly, the brokers have done alright. They're in the money, rise or fall. Being in THAT position (brokerage) is where there is money to be made. What so many people (and companies, investors et al) fail to recognise is that the internet is exactly that: a vehicle for brokerage. Whether it's the exchange of money or information, property (including intellectual) or services, the internet is almost purely a transactional environment. If you want to leverage the power of the internet, it is its ability to facilitate transactions better than its real-world equivalent.
I suppose Google hid its business model quite well for too long, we all switched from a homepage full of adverts to a simple search box. And everyone believed Google were offering us a great search facility out of the goodness of their hearts. No-one uses their ISPs home page as their homepage any more. And the Internet looks free.
Monetising the internet is not impossible. Google has succeeded by usurping (and improving on) Yellow Pages as the primary indexing source for business. Ebay has succeeded by usurping (and improving on) the auction house/cottage industry/market stall (ground rent). Real-world businesses who embrace the internet stand to gain not just by creating a point of sale but also with regard to business logic and process integration. Although it's an oversimplification, successfully exploiting the internet is more about regarding it as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
Then you add in the I players and newspaper sites and it's too good to be true. But you know what they say about if something looks too good to be true.
It's important not to lose sight of the fact that most of us are paying tens of pounds more per month these days for delivery of an internet connection which didn't exist or wasn't available before the mid nineties. The iPlayer isn't free, but the cost of access to it is well hidden, or is integrated into the connection we've all accepted that we do have to pay for. It is too good to be free, I agree.