Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all.

We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.

The free option with libraries was somewhat limited because libraries rarely had more than a small number of copies of a given book or newspaper.

Saying people with higher income bought for convenience is understating the situation. If you needed timely access to books or newspapers that were in high demand you often had to buy out of necessity.

I'm not sure how a similar thing would work the internet. How do you limit the number of people that can use the free version? If you don't the people who could pay largely won't.

The only idea I've heard that might work is to just make it free for everyone, but put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with use, and divvy up that tax to the sites based on their traffic.

That then raises questions like what to tax and how to divvy it up since simply dividing it proportionally to traffic probably would not work well (Richard Stallman has suggesed such a system, with the split based on the cube root of popularity).

Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.