I do not think it is accurate to say that Gnutella could not provide the same "experience;" at the height of its popularity, Gnutella was basically the same experience as we have with TPB and file hosting services today. People still have to navigate around trojan horses when they download illegally, people still have to deal with long wait times, people still encounter seemingly good results that fail to deliver what they want (with torrents and file hosting). "Curating" is only relevant with the officially endorsed services, and those services would never have been able to compete in a world where people thought of things in terms of peer-to-peer sharing.

The reason you saw Gnutella and the like die was the wave of lawsuits from the RIAA, which led to people being terrified to upload anything. Peer to peer does not work if people are unwilling to share. The RIAA also successfully killed the companies that were trying to make peer to peer more usable by developing spam filters and improving robustness (e.g. Limewire).

It is not as though the concept of people downloading music was introduced to the RIAA by Napster. Several months before Napster started, the RIAA began work on SDMI, an attempt to thwart music downloading. The RIAA knew that people were downloading music over the Internet: anonymous FTP, IRC, Usenet, etc. It is not that the RIAA did not know how to react to the increase in copyright infringement; they were already working on a way to fight downloading.

The record companies did not think for a moment that their business model was being "obliterated" by downloading. They were working on DRM because they believed that downloading was the next technological change that they would need to exploit to stay in business. Home taping had been dealt with years earlier, after all, so why do you think they were afraid of downloading in and of itself?

What the RIAA was really afraid of was peer to peer. The RIAA's executives view the world in terms of one-to-many interactions: one producer serving the needs of many consumers. What made them panic was the idea that music could be spread without any centralization at all. With nobody to sue, buy out, tax, or otherwise deal with, the RIAA was basically left with none of the weapons it previously wielded. The only strategy left to them was to kill the idea of peer to peer sharing, by scaring people away, and get people to think like customers again. The point of suing college students, grandmothers, and other people whose net worth was not even a blip on the RIAA's RADAR was to scare people away from peer to peer, and back to systems that allowed the RIAA to use its legal weapons.

That they eventually managed to create competitive download services is a separate issue; they were going to do that anyway, just like they eventually exploited FM radio and eventually exploited cassette tapes. They understood that computers could be music players long before peer to peer, they just needed a few years to figure out how they could make money from that. As long as people believe they require the services of some industrial-scale operation to obtain their music, the RIAA is not afraid.

As for stopping the signal with sufficient money, I think you absolutely can do that, and I think you are going to see it happen within your lifetime. Eventually, you are going to buy a locked-down device that can only connect to your ISP's movie and music streaming sites, and a few other "approved" websites, and only use "approved" protocols; in exchange, you'll pay less for an Internet connection (anyone who wants more will be directed to "business class service," which will cost twice as much for half the throughput). Your computer will not allow you to download anything you did not get permission to download, and will not be able to upload anything audio or video related. You will not be allowed to run unapproved software. Shortsighted people will say it is more secure and will say that their grandmother does not need anything else. Yes, there will be jailbreaks, but you'll have to know someone who has a computer that can even download and run the jailbreaking software (think mod chips).

That's what money can buy. Lots of corporations with lots of money are working to make that a reality, and in the absence of a "killer app" for uninhibited Internet use (like, say, a peer to peer network) it will only be matter of finding the right price point and features.