Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to inject unnecessary rent-seeking lock-ins into everybody's lives.
The average message posted to comp.lang.c before Eternal September was far batter than the average message posted to HN, Proggit, etc. But many of the former were written by academics, so you probably don't care.
It was extracted from tuition paid by undergraduate students and taxes paid by taxpayers.
And that money all eventually came from dirty capitalism.
And yes, it cost a lot of money to get online and/or host data back then, which was subsidized by piggybacking corporate and university internet presence. Nowadays it's dirt cheap to personally host & access tons of content, so there's even less need to monetize.