Internet was never free. For starters there was always the access fee, which is nowadays significantly lower than it was in the past (compare prices of access time in the era of dial-up versus data amount based pricing of today). Then we had shareware, watermarks, explicit trials or severely limited versions, etc. versus full products that cost as much as a car or a small house (the real reason behind piracy), and which have today free (and capable) alternatives usable in "production". You would be also hard pressed to find e.g. a free dictionary back in the day. If anything, internet (software) is today money-wise substantially cheaper than it was decades ago due to incessant (and dare I say increasing) pressure of independent actors who don’t trade their products for personal data or anything else.