It's not some nebulous evil of "capitalism" that is the issue here, it is the issue of filtering, manipulation, and distribution of people's private communications & data, and of the effective "town square". Money can be and has been made without these practices, which the laws have not caught up with, and to which there's strong ethical disagreement.

And yes, it cost a lot of money to get online and/or host data back then, which was subsidized by piggybacking corporate and university internet presence. Nowadays it's dirt cheap to personally host & access tons of content, so there's even less need to monetize.