Web 2.0 was never free, people just didn't realize they had a product that they could get paid for.

The analogy I use when I try to explain this concept to "normies" is, imagine you buy a house. You live there for 20 years, then one day you go up in the attic and see a door that you never noticed was there.

You open the door, and there's some dude living in there. You ask him wtf he's doing in your house, and he says "What do you mean? I've been paying rent to Mark Zuckerberg for the past 20 years."