My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB.

The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on.

The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product.

The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.