Utopias not being achievable doesn't make them useless. They give us a model for how things could be better. Marx's communism is never going to happen, but it gave people a model to compare industrial society to, and the labor movements that grew out of those comparisons did make things suck less for workers. So, the Internet as a place without scarcity or political control, where what you know is the only thing that limits your ability to participate, can be a good model even if the Internet has never and will never really be that. It gives us a standard by which to judge the actually existing Internet, and a better standard than "how easy is this to monetize".
Well, but failure to understand or appreciate what "perfect" really means causes one to apply false principles and unhealthy goals. Consider: Marxism/leninism arose out of misunderstanding Moore's Utopia so instead of free food for all and universal human rights the USSR got bread lines, oligarchy and crony capitalism. An internet without scarcity or political control reflects a world devoid of intellectual property or economic protections; when the whole world is Wikileaks and Napster your entertainment industry becomes Double Rainbow All The Way and the cinnamon challenge while your privacy becomes The Fappening.
I think intellectual property is much more a hindrance than an aid, and while Lenin did misread Marx his misreadings had less to do with the way the USSR ended up than the problem vanguards have had ever since; they run their government the way they did their revolution. That's all a tangent thought. If you work in film and television, you think IP is just fine because it gets you your royalties, and if you work in software you think it's ridiculous because bits don't have colors and if the law would stop insisting you pretend otherwise you could fix that damned nVidia driver bug that has been driving you nuts for years. We compromise, which means that everything sucks for everyone but hopefully the suckage is evenly distributed. Compromise isn't what you aspire to though; otherwise you wouldn't have anything to compromise.
Wow. Paranoia. Backintheday... I think everyone whose livelihood is dependent on mechanically reproducible goods is interested in royalties of some sort. "Of some sort" is always the sticking point. And that's why I think utopias, particularly in this context, are useless: the problem is always in the gray areas, not in the principles.