But they have the money!

Same. Streaming services reinvented cable. The open web is increasingly hidden behind paywalls. Instead of having the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips, you have 5 billion tiny creators begging you to sign up for their goat-fat candle-making course on udacity. You can’t look in any direction without advertisers stabbing you in the eyes and claiming that it’s their god-given right to scream their snake-oil sales pitch directly into your brain; and if you install an ad blocker you’re the one stealing food out of content creators mouths, not the ~5 people who control 50 % of the total wealth of humanity…

So now we can only what the streaming providers have licensed, and those things which we’ve “purchased” can and do disappear from our devices. And our answers are increasingly becoming hidden behind paywalls that require specific subscriptions & unskippable ads.

“Today” is only better than yesterday due to a recent huge disruption called “the internet” and companies are absolutely scrambling to restore the “bad old days” status quo that you allude to.