That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor.
I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just lookup and read about anything for free.
The price of giving free access to everyone has been very high though. We continue to pay with our eroded privacy, personal information that's frequently breached, the cost of advertising that's passed on through product pricing, the cost of giving up so much control of the internet to three or four giant companies, the sheer cost of fighting against advertising in our browsers and so on. We're practically held hostage by advertising - a downturn in ad spending leads to content and publishing companies closing down. The cost of free is strangely expensive.
Maybe it would be better to fund more useful things, like sites that give children access to knowledge through direct contributions. Like how Wikipedia is funded.
I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just lookup and read about anything for free.