That's a depressingly shallow knee-jerk-y way of reasoning around something so fantastically open as the Internet... You're offering the deplorable solution of "let the money vote" instead of reason and restraint. The consequence if we had asked for money from the get-go would've been a corporate-ruled scenario where connectivity and Internet foothold were primarily in the hands of the businesses that had the most money. Smaller businesses, and non-profits in particular, would effectively have been shut out and innovation and growth in the Internet's most sensitive phase would have suffered greatly.

The world is not black and white, and paid service can easily coexist with subsidized service. There are many examples of “it costs you $XX but ask us if you need it badly” policies. The best varieties probably do some degree of vetting (because otherwise would slightly defeat the point or make it impractical, especially while LLMs are cheap enough that anyone can use one to write a convincing tear-jerker) and have objective criteria.

I haven’t thought enough to say whether it makes sense for specific cases like IP address allocation, though.

The fact of the matter is that “let the money vote” works much better than alternatives. “Reason and restraint” is precisely how we got to where we are.

Have you looked at the state of the world? "Let the money vote" works better than "let anyone just commandeer the finite resource, but only once", if nobody immoral enough to exploit it learns about vulnerabilities in your system.

If I can use my money to vote for "give me more money" at a profit, and I have no qualms about doing so, then I win – and if we play multiple such games with the same money, then we end up with a situation that's worse than "let anyone commandeer the resource".