true, and there will always be a market for good content, especially authoritative technical content (financial newsletters are a good current example - people pay for them despite all the free and ad-supported websites out there).

it's also possible that the desire to have everything be free will trigger a worse-is-better downslide where no one creates really good content because no one will pay for it because everyone is satisfied with good-enough free content, but i doubt that will happen; i just want there to be enough good-enough free content that people who can't or won't pay still have their needs met.

while we're dreaming, there are two things i'd really like to see emerge:

1. a true shared culture with a continuous gradient from pure consumer to prolific producer. something like tumblr is a good proto-example - there are people who just browse feeds, and people who reshare, and remix, and add their own writing, and write entirely new posts, and every now and then a truly beautiful post emerges and makes its way out onto the wider web

2. a thriving distributed patronage model, where people fund the creation of a work via kickstarter etc., but then the work is released freely, having made its money already

both these things are already starting to be experimented with, but they are badly in need of mindshare.