The lack of a proper website revenue model (e.g. micro-cash payments using built-in secure wallets allowing pageviews for 10 cents or even less) has not only been highly destructive to web commerce but also has spread, like a cancer, to destroy existing business models (such as recorded music and newspapers).
Our entire economy is based on persuading people to move money around – to pay money to buy stuff that is largely unnecessary (which is why the fashion industry is such a brilliant flag-bearer for capitalism!). It is the rate of flow of money around society that makes us all rich, not how much money that actually exists.
The web's enforced habit of giving things away for free not only risks directly destroying many established industries, but in the long term threatens to destroy our entire economy by undermining that circular flow of money.
Free may well end up making us all poor. And the lack of a proper revenue model for the Internet will ultimately be to blame for that.