Whatever Happened to the Free Internet?

Okay, so today is Mother's Day. As I always do, I'm gonna send my mom an ecard. So I get online to pick one.

Every ecard site I've been too now charges, this includes Yahoo! and a few others I had bookmarked.

What happened to the days of the free internet? Remember that, when everything on the internet was free, and if anyone charged for content there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth?

It used to be that for something like ecards, all the sites had a few free ones, but the bulk were what you paid for. What happened to the free stuff? Why wasn't I notified? How am I gonna fix these teeth?