I think you have this backwards. Tech companies had to pay for their operations, after people balked at buying $500 sets of CDs of Adobe Photoshop, every 3 years. The web was invented, and "Software as a Service" became a thing, and a different way to make money. So people balked at spending $5/mo for the same software they would have paid $500 for on a CD. Then other people decided that the user's data was even more valuable than the software itself, so now they give away the software (or charge a nominal fee of $1 or $2.99 for an app), and then make money off your data on the back end. Someone has to pay for the programmers. As soon as people realize that their data is precious - and worth far more than $500 - they will go back to paying for the can't-share-my-data version of applications. It's not a zero-sum game. Employees have to get paid to provide the services you want. They will either get paid by you buying their app for a reasonable amount, or they will get it by selling your data to someone else.