Right. Unfortunately, people have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets, and prefer to pay with their time and attention (and ignore the fact that they're being psychologically manipulated into buying random products and services) than with actual cash.

I expect you could get some people to pay for a messaging platform, but it would be a very small platform, and your business would not grow very much. And most of your users will still have to use other (proprietary, closed) messaging services as well, to talk to their friends and family who don't want to pay for your platform. While that wouldn't be a failure, I wouldn't really call that a significant win, either.

This is why legislation/regulation is the only way to make this happen. The so-called "free market" (a thing that doesn't really exist) can never succeed at this, to the detriment of us all.