I agree.

20-something years ago, when I paid for my internet connection, I also got an email address (or 5…) and some personal web space (5MB maybe?) and access to their NTP servers as part of that. No ads.

Of course if I left the ISP I would lose access to it, as I stopped paying for it. I’ve long since left the ISP, and they’ve dropped all these value adds.

Presumably because people wanted cheaper plans and jumped to other providers which did internet access and nothing else.

There are people willing to pay a reasonable amount for fair services. I pay for various Google and Apple services, including for email. Those that don’t, have ads based plans.

I miss the online storage. My ISP let you use it to host your own site. So I hosted and tinkered - bliss