Would you be willing for Cloudflare to "Know their customer" (you) and pay 3 cents to access the forum, instead of filling in the captcha?
Internet non-ad monetization will also be in the form of massive syndication, where a subscriber gets access to thousands of high quality websites, and web publishers get access to millions of subscribers. But they need to take a hint from streaming services and really make massive syndicates which includes everything for everyone for this to work.
The systems you described not only record that information and make it available for warrants, they also sell it, and allow warrantless searches of it in some circumstances.
for the forum example: many forums have a policy to only allow access to attachments to logged-in users. i can't remember the last time i registered at a new forum just to view an attachment: the effect has always been to drive me elsewhere. no complaints -- these solutions work if your goal is to reduce load. i'm suspicious that they can drive monetization outside of a very few niches.
Maybe that's too optimistic though based on the responses in this thread.
As it is, their captchas are already blocking tons of human traffic.
The idea that the price will be low unless you access it a lot falls over due to caching. Big tech companies will cache whatever they scrape, paying for one copy. Regular people and smaller companies will not read the same thing enough to amortize the cost of the first fetch, so they’ll pay 1000’s to 1,000,000’s of times more than the monopolies per-use of a given piece of information.
If individuals set up a federated cache with open access, they’ll get sued for copyright infringement. (Even though that would solve the supposed problem: That cloudflare cannot afford to operate a cache).
The end result is that only closed agents will be allowed to (legally) read most content without paying extortion-level fees.
Also, like with YouTube and video, serving text will become a winner-takes-all proposition.