This is not unreasonable. The publisher of a certain web document wants the user to see his pages in a particular font, user doesn't really care. User reads page, font signals foundry, foundry invoices publisher. If font cannot signal the foudnry it'll lose feautures, or stop working altogether. It can be done and makes sense.
Professional fonts are somewhat of a prestige market.
But there still is massive abuse of fonts in the professional world. Though it would be nice to be able to wish it away, it won't. Every single ad agency, student and music magazine in the world seems to have Trixie, but I only sold 1200 copies in 5 years. That's the reason I'm not optimistic about fonts on line. It's a daily fight, over and over again to get people to pay for the things that they use.