It seems worth noting that the people who think this are wrong. The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The basic assumption behind the fond hope for direct user fees for content is a simple theory of pricing, sometimes called 'cost plus', where the price of any given thing is determined by figuring out its cost to produce and distribute, and then adding some profit margin. While there are many economic conditions which defy this old saw, its basic precepts are worth remembering. Prices rise when demand outstrips supply, even if both are falling.
Prices fall when supply outstrips demand, even if both are rising.
This second state describes the network perfectly, since the Web is growing even faster than the number of new users. From the point of view of our hapless hopeful 'content provider', waiting for the largesse of beneficent users, the primary benefits from the network come in the form of cost savings from storage and distribution, and in access to users worldwide. This desire on the part of publishers of various stripes to cut costs by offering their wares over the network misconstrues what their readers are paying for. Much of what people are rewarding businesses for when they pay for 'content', even if they don't recognize it, is not merely creating the content but producing and distributing it. Transporting dictionaries or magazines or weekly shoppers is hard work, and requires a significant investment.