"Information wants to be free" has, since the moment Stewart Brand uttered it, meant "I'm not paying you for your intellectual property." It has never meant "I'm giving my shit away" but has always meant "I'm not paying you."

Your article bitches about the accumulation of wealth at the top of streaming services and such without acknowledging that accumulation of wealth at the top is a function of capitalism. Hell, it's a function of statistics. What it doesn't acknowledge is the highest earners on Spotify, all time, aggregated, have earned about as much as ABBA.

Information was never free. HAS never been free. The idea that it might somehow be free is a crass sleight-of-hand to obscure the costs of information propagation and enrobe the act of theft in a gloss of nobility.

Libraries cost. Someone has to pay for them. Google's whole thing was "fucking make us." "I'm not stealing from you, I'm sharing your information" only works if the world has already decided you're not entitled to stuff you paid for but from the very fucking beginning the architects of the Internet have had "charge people for things we get for free" as their business model. Your authors are no better:

Payments weren’t built into the internet’s infrastructure—it was considered too risky. Marc Andreessen called this “the original sin of the internet.”

How do you quote Marc Andreessen without context, particularly when talking about payments? His whole thing was stealing NCSA Mosaic from a public university, privatizing it, going public and then proceeding to profit off of others following his business model.