> Do you think it woukd be better if we were still billed by the kilobyte used?What does this have to do with Google? Yes, my ISP charges me a flat monthly fee for Internet access, and I prefer that pricing structure to being billed by the kilobyte (not that any ISP I'm aware of tries that any longer). But I'm still paying directly for the service. My ISP doesn't give me my Internet connection for free and then try to monetize it by showing me ads.
> A pay per use or monthly quota would outright discourage curiosity and add in another mental fatigue of tracking costs
Google could use the same pricing structure my ISP does: a flat monthly fee, with no limit on usage, billed to my credit card. No more mental fatigue than "do I have a working Internet connection?", which is exactly how much mental fatigue it takes for me to use Google now.
Would this be a challenge to achieve at scale? Sure. But a company that really took the motto "don't be evil" seriously would be taking on exactly this kind of challenge, precisely because it's a problem that someone is going to have to solve sooner or later, and is worth a lot to whoever solves it because it makes things better for everybody. Who better to do it than Google? But instead of hiring smart engineers to solve this problem, they're hiring smart engineers to figure out better ways to capture users' eyeballs. It's insane.
> Keeping information access gated behind wealth
In a sane society, resources like Google search would be made more widely available by the standard method taught in economics classes: price discrimination. The price they charge for their services would vary according to what the particular customer can easily afford. People in first world countries, like me, might pay $10 or $20 a month. People in the poorest countries, where Internet access itself is not guaranteed, might pay nothing, as they do now. Google has about four billion users and about $180 billion in annual revenue; that works out to an average of $45 a year per user. That seems feasible, if they are allowed to price discriminate. But of course price discrimination is considered "evil", even though it's not--it delivers more value to more people when it is allowed to happen.
> Your data being monetized by others is not an intrinsic harm.
While there are of course ways in which my data can be monetized that don't harm me, I think the actual evidence clearly shows that the ways in which our data is being monetized do carry a high risk of causing harm. "Traffic surveys" is not a good proxy for what most data harvesters are actually doing.