"Trillion dollar company will definitely make tens of trillions of dollars in AI revenue but no, sorry, it can't pay a few thousand dollars to authors of content they trained on."
It's not about VCs being scum but about investors needing a relatively fast return on investment which is understandable but also often times incompatible with investment in large scale, open source infrastructure.
If the road is privatised by the virtue of it being mostly used by private companies like Waymo (in the future) then they can foot the bill for road construction and maintenance.