What are you talking about? The web was always about capitalism and centralization!
You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog. It’s good that the big corps systematically block you out so you as an individual have to use their services. Who wants privacy really? Sounds like criminal stuff, we just need to peek at your data to serve you better ads. Ignore law enforcement paying us for your data, nothing bad will come of that.
Tim’s intention with the web was information sharing. He wanted a way for academics to share their work with other academics. He identified a problem at his time at CERN, and proposed a solution.
Then corporations were quick on capitalizing on this idea.
I think it’s a tragedy we’ve lost individual websites and services
They felt so alive. Back then like a sun and now like a candle.
Sometimes in the Web Archive or some forgotten but still running amateur hosting, or in Neocities you can see those old pages, they feel like visiting someone's home, frozen in time since 2003.
Have you ever encountered error code 402? Payment Required
That's been part of HTTP since at least 1992. His w3c wanted to make micropayments part of the web. The reason it did not take off is that no one had a use for it. The web was too cheap to meter.
This would be perfect for the current problem of monetizing journalism. I am happy to pay a small fee to read an article. I am not ok subscribing to your entire website that requires an account when I get blasted with unsolicited emails and my data is sold to a 3rd party to pad your profits.
You don't really sound like someone who'd be happy to have a payment system hard-coded into their browser. I don't think it would help, either. Just as with ads you'd be monetizing clickbait and not journalism.