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A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
(slrpnk.net)
OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
But if I understood you correctly, that only deals with the problem of paying for your internet connection. By far the biggest cost for servers is the power consumption and probably hardware second. Making internet usage free wouldn't do much.
Usually, it is paid by the people who use it, and that is also typically the taxpayers and extra from selling products or services as individual options, packages, or contracts. (Like postage stamps or shipping costs)
The above statement was to your comment, but I went on a rant about subscription models and didn't feel like deleting it. Please ignore or take as a grain of salt. I didn't revise what I said or finish my thoughts on subscriptions:
Most have taken the monthly subscription approach because it is easier to take money automatically monthly vs. selling individually. The downside is that consumers lose freedom as subscriptions are just bundles with a monthly contract or license. Sometimes, it is cheaper as a subscription if there is heavy enough use of the service as the cost is usually spread out to all subscribers. This, unfortunately, incentivize you to be using the bundle more than everyone else. Usually, companies limit you to prevent subscription costs from being overshadowed by the cost of doing business with outliers/power users. This is worse for capitalism markets as there is an incentive to offer limited cheap products instead of a free market where there is a variety of product ranges to choose from. It is a sort of natural homogenized process that makes each competitor similar. To combat this, tiers are offered with bundled higher limits and/or more features. A downside to tiers is that the lower tiers are slowly gutted of features to transition more users to higher tiers. further increasing the companies profits artificially as bundles muddled what was demanded vs. what is supplied.