"please give credit where credit is due"

I already did in the last portion of the very post you quoted.

"charging people for a service that hardly costs you is pushing it"

You have absolutely no clue as to how much bandwidth costs on a monthly basis.  Multiple T3's, along with the servers and personnel necessary to operate and maintain them doesn't hardly cost anything. 

I'd love you to explain how you feel it hardly costs anything to offer online gaming services?

Age of Empires Online.

Free, but the content that provides the game with real value requires additional purchases.

Age of Empires Online is F2P.  It being free has nothing to do with Steam.

If sony doesn't shift to a paid online service, whoever made that decision should be fired. Sony is leaving way too much money on the table by offering free online.

The economics are crystal clear at least in the US. Not charging for online could put Sony out of business or at least relegate them to a niche player.

Microsoft tried something like the Share button with XBL and people disabled it.  A few friends might be interested in what you share, but the majority of people will find it annoying and disable it.  I'm not saying offering it is a bad thing, I'm not sure gaming and social networks fit together.  Possibly if it ties back to Sony's own forums it may be successful, but the problem is the audience.  If Sony provides a way to direct the shared content to a "Gamers" group you create, then it may work.  However, if I was a teenager and I had my parents, friends, classmates, and teachers on my Facebook, I wouldn't want to be sharing to everyone of them that I just made an awesome kill Call of Duty, when I was supposed to be working on an essay that I didn't turn in the following day.

The audience to me is just wrong for sharing gaming content.

I can see them charging less than Microsoft for online play, and have it better.  Microsoft gets squeezed.  What I don't see is why there is a presumption Sony has NO interest in charging people for online play.  Sony HAS charged for online play in the past.  The only option for a console player, if Sony charged, was to go to Nintendo.  In a poll I had run on here, not many would defect to Nintendo, just to not pay for online play.

It's free to play up to Level 20 with three civilizations, but if you want achievements, if you want to be able to use some of the cool stuff you accumulate, or actually play versus or with someone else that'll cost you.

Lets be honest here, when you play CoD Microsoft servers are not hosting the game ( that's where many people get misled they believe microsoft actually gets involved in the online play where in the case of the most popular games they do not even host the servers), so yes they are charging you for a service they don't provide.

In that case the bandwith you use is the one provided by your ISP and Microsoft's server hardly get involved.

Like others have pointed it out there is a reason a much smaller company ( Valve) can provide a similar service for free on the PC...

I am happy that I am wealthy enough to not care about $60 / year. I am sorry for all you other guys.

Seriously, why do you make such a big deal out of this? It is $5 PER MONTH. I pay 2.8€ (about $3.6) a DAY just for the metro to get to work.