Yes. Users wising up will hopefully put an end to that money. Your statement is similar to saying that ending the NSA is not a practical solution because "power". So our personal autonomy is fucked because money and power - I'm willing to admit that this may be the inevitable answer, but in what way is it productive?
It's indeed hard to imagine a world in which users control their data - that is the extent of how hard we've been pwned.
Some of these systems were in place long before the issue could possibly be on anyone's radar, and would/will take quite a lot of work to extricate ourselves. anonymous payments - hard, especially now with Bitcoin on the scene. cell service - a bit harder, TOR+wifi+bearer payment for programmatic wifi access. physical address obfuscation - even harder, physical package mix network backed by repu (fuck, I give up).
But Youtube? You could write a software frontend tomorrow that avoided being Google's slave by not sending cookies. Comments would be a little harder, but that's a feature - I think a recent study showed glancing at those actually causes brain cancer. Beyond that, I guess TOR to scrub IPs until a better (high-latency) mix network comes along.
Email is a broken naive protocol like HTTP which relies on centralized identities, and can thus never really be secured. But secure messaging itself is a low hanging fruit. The fact we don't have it already shows that we seriously need to invest effort into building the ladder.