I would prefer the hidden costs of using a service to vanish and for those costs to be replaced with explicit costs. I don't delude myself in thinking the majority hold my view on this though. I personally prefer $1/mo to Free* any day, but would only really do so without the explicit tracking involved.

Sadly, subscription models are the way to mass adoption. People are lazy and want to make one explicit payment to some centralized authority that then grants them a theoretically unlimited, but practically and economically limited, selection. It's the retail store all over again, just on the web. Spotify, Netflix, Steam replaces craigslist.

I see the perfect world being a super thin middle-man client(s) that exposes a protocol that the content producer/seller implements. Want to buy a song, a game, a movie, article? Use a client to access and pay for it then receive it. Still want a middleman to handle refunds, advice, suggestions, support? Go find a car salesman, Amazon or flattr thick client that'll add their markup for added convenience. I think this would shift the current problem away from "getting into Steam for a reasonable price" to "making a good game".

There are abuse, censorship, maintainability, legal, adoption, discovery concerns, but I said perfect world. I'm just afraid for a future where DRM/EME and Webassembly obfuscation make it impossible to get quality content on the web when everyone flocks to these gatekeepers for everything. Cable companies 2.0.