When you pay your water bill, you aren’t just paying for the upkeep of the pipes that brought the water to your house – you’re also paying for the production of that water. The internet should be no different.
Besides paying a fixed monthly cost to your ISP for the physical connection, there should be a tiny monetary amount – a fraction of a cent – attached to each HTTP request you make, that can go towards covering server costs. Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising. Replacing this with direct payments would drastically curtail the data broker and surveillance industry that currently lives off of it.
How server costs would be measured, and whether sites would be allowed to charge a premium on top of that (eliminating paywalls, but also making web browsing a much more price-weary activity) is up for debate.
But currently using the internet is like paying for a car, without paying road tax.
You’re approaching something worth thinking about. You could say it’s like ordering something to be delivered to your house and then paying the tolls for the delivery truck. But importantly missing from your analysis is that the delivery truck also has to pay the tolls. It’s essentially a double-dipping situation.
From a data standpoint it’s also pretty bad. Your request to Netflix is a few hundred bytes. Their response is gigabytes.