All electronic networks, from the original arpanet to tor, have suffered from the same problem: someone needs to pay for them yet each individual transaction is too small to matter.
Surveillance capitalism is the one model that scaled better than 'let the army and universities pay for it' and it's the one we're stuck with until Xanadu becomes something more than vaporware.
It costs nothing else to put a packet out there on the Net sans doing so through a draconian metered connection, and surveillance capitalism had nothing to do with that. In fact, if anything, the fact the Net was free did more to boost surveillance capitalism than anything else.
If companies actually had to pay to collect, hold, operate on, and be privy to information about people; In Short, if there were acknowledged data privacy rights in play with regard to people's meta-information, and it was not just handed to corporations as a blank check money making asset, surveillance capitalism couldn't have gotten off the ground.