I've thought for a while now that the design of the internet may have been fundamentally sabotaged by that fact that it was primarily created by government funded academics. In that scenario, there wasn't any need to attach a price to any part of the resources used by this new creation, since it's creators paid few if any costs for it themselves. So eventually the internet grew up to be fundamentally free, where to charge a price to download a webpage goes against every instinct baked into the system and the user.

What other method of information transfer has no default method of requiring payment before transferring information? If the internet had had to pay for itself at any point during it's beginning, you can bet that HTTP status code "402 Payment Required" wouldn't of sat abandoned for 20 years with no implementation.