People supplied small scale infrastructure for free. Supplying the sort of infrastructure necessary to run the internet at scale is very likely impossible without some sort of commercialisation. You need full time people to keep it going, so you have to pay them because they have rent and food bills. You can't run things on a voluntary basis once they get to a certain scale.
Likewise with professionally produced content - you just can't expect it to happen without paying someone to do it because it takes more time to make than you can reasonably expect people to give for free. People need to eat, which means you have to pay them.
That, of course, does not automatically mean you have to have a corporation involved. Something like Patreon[1] would work just as well.
Maybe that's the answer, then. Speaking of media and journalism, I see very little of value coming from the large centralized outlets nowadays. There's entirely too much agenda pushing, non-objectivity being paraded around as if that's a positive, "native" advertisements, banality as "breaking news", and all the other nonsense everyone already knows.
Think about it - look at how guarded you have to be when consuming news to ensure you're not consuming an advertisement or a propaganda piece. Look how often you have to ask the question "What is this person trying to get me to believe?"
This shouldn't be necessary!
I think we can do better. And I think the problem isn't with the players per se, but with the game as its rules are currently written. That means we start over, with a new architecture, new everything.
Call me an extremist, but I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that things like news shouldn't be profit makers. The desire for more money in that industry perverts just about everything it touches. What good is paying reporters to go source facts if they're going to be distorted and manipulated by the time they're presented to the public?
And the kind of news and editorials provided by the community (social media posts, forum content, blog posts, wiki articles, etc) could well be a better replacement for it. After all, they're already more accurate than the vast majority of the commercial media (since there are fewer financial/political incentives to lie), and the amount of ads and tracking is a lot less as well.
IMHO the problem is that it's still too hard to pay for something like an online newspaper. From a usability perspective, I want to enter in some payment information once and then be able to read seamlessly for a year (for example). Meaning that I don't want to share a bunch of personal information, or my FaceBook profile, and I don't want to create a separate userID to log into the site.
Part of this comes down to having an ID that is both reliable and portable across devices, while not being tied to other personal information, and requires zero effort from the user. That's a hard problem, but I think it's one that needs to be solved.
The ID thing is not difficult and keeping it anonymous is also pretty easy, but I don't think anonymity should be required. It should be an option.
The ID thing does not exist. I've said this before, the internet needs strong identity to resolve a lot of problems. You can always strip identity away in places that require anonymity. The problem here is that if you go to the online newspaper, there is no way for them to know who you are to verify the prior payment. I guess that line of thought narrows the problem - they don't need to know who you are, only that you've paid, but that's very close to the same thing.
Think of it like google/fb login. I can ask for the bare minimum on my site and basically just get a token. It doesn't tell me who you are, but just that you have an ID in the google/fb system.
The question was whether commercial content can survive.