People had gigabytes of free music on their computers and wanted a place to store them that enabled easy playback, hence the iPod. iTunes removed the friction necessary in piracy and priced inventory low enough to emerge as a viable alternative.
One way this coronavirus situation forces people to consider universal coverage is that the less fortunate, without health care and means for testing, become an attack vector for the virus towards the more fortunate. This makes universal coverage in the self-interest of the more fortunate, and hopefully they realize cost-efficient.
If you have an old router with USB 2.0 ports lying around it's fairly straightforward to install OpenWRT and Zerotier and make a VPN with a private cloud attached if you mount a HDD, and as long as your file transfer requirements aren't too intense. Have one running on my LAN and it works well for FTP, SMB shares for backup, and normal VPN stuff. Plus, it doesn't consume much power as it's MIPS chipset.