That would be great: that would open the door to possibility (viability) of YouTube competitor

> It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993".

The idea is older than the 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

when it comes to the vast majority of the content on youtube, it was created by someone other than google with the expectation that it would be free.

There is now an expectation that people should be able to find and listen to any song they want on youtube (to a lesser extent movies and TV shows too), but that has less to do with how people feel about the internet and more about our broken copyright system and that most of that content used to be broadcast to the public.

If youtube were behind a paywall most people wouldn't spend as much time (if any) watching youtube videos and far fewer people would bother creating content for it. That'd be a losing situation for Google since they need the public's eyes on ads and a steady stream of data to mine from both content creators and viewers.