Any product or service that can be delivered via the Web at no marginal cost will eventually be offered to consumers free. Another way of putting it is that no one will be able to charge for something that costs them little or nothing. By offering a traffic-builder or loss leader for a lower price than the competition. A price war quickly ensues, and sooner or later everyone in the business is forced to offer that product or service free in order to stay in the game, and sell their main product. There are several examples, one of which is stock price quotes.
Big investors like to keep up with the prices of their stocks on an hourly basis.
Stockbrokers have always offered free quotes over the phone to their customers. Not a convincing example, you say, because that was really just a case of some scamsters trying to charge for something that had been free before the Web. Decades ago, stock investing was strictly the province of the wealthy, until retail stockbrokers like Paine Webber and Merrill Lynch came along. Along came a chap named Charles Schwab, who realized that a lot of investors were paying PW and Merrill for services they didn't need, namely advice. Of course, other upstarts had undercut Schwab even before the Web came along, and there are now several places on the Web where you may trade stocks.