I think the internet at its best is when it's ad-free, not harvesting and selling user data, and free to use.
Wikipedia is one of the most successful projects on the internet, and it works exactly like that.
Hypothetically, I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of compensation model. But experience shows that as soon as you introduce a for-profit model, people in charge will eventually ask the question "hey, if this is making money, couldn't we squeeze much more money out of it!?!?"