You can give away software, but running a service costs money. P2p messaging can be free (and signal exists), but nothing like free and adless YouTube or Facebook is going to happen regardless whether google or meta do anything to prevent it.
In fact, I don't believe the ad model would have gone away if everyone started paying for a subscription. The bottom tier would still be filled with ads.
Ideally, the market would solve this. The companies that are pushing annoying would lose customers to the companies that don't. But since we don't live in a ideal world, I honestly think regulations would be the only way. Something like "If a customer pays for subscription in any way, you can't show ads" - and then let the companies put a realistic price to their subscription tiers, which makes it worthwhile for them.
I don't see what people find so grating about having a ad-load/cost spectrum. Maybe it's just confusion about the billing model.
agreed its trickier when its gets to stuff like youtube, but piracy being free and widely spread is an example of how its possible, just not well developed right now
there's also options where it's pay-as-you-go with stuff like bitcoin (e.g. i pay $0.01 to watch a video) where it's effectively free but on large scale does cover the costs of infra
Things require labor. Labor costs money. Ergo, people giving you stuff require money, somehow. A tetris clone requires so little labour, that a well-off person with too much time (ergo labor) on their hands can give you that for free, but that's not scalable for 99% of important stuff.
Because capitalism, they also require more money, YoY, than last year, meaning they can't just make a steady stream of profit. They need more profit every year.
And as you cite piracy as an alternative: that’s not "free" as in software, that’s "free" as in freeloading. Someone else is paying for it, just not you. That might work to fulfil your own needs, but it’s not a viable solution for business models.
my point with torrenting is that people offer their bandwidth for free without any real incentive to do so. if there was more systemic open source adoption and awareness of how systems like this work well when people make token donations (like with bandwidth) then i think we could be fine.