You’re underestimating how much work and skill it takes to make a good font, even for a great designer, so type foundries like to lock good fonts up behind rent-seeking license agreements.
Rent-seeking would be if Google demanded money from a font designer to let their fonts be "compatible" with Chrome. I.e. Pay me or I'll make sure your product doesn't work with my product. App stores is a common example; pay Apple or they'll make sure your software doesn't run on the iPhone.
Some features of the license agreement are though.
For example, some foundries require you buy a special expensive license in order to use their fonts in a PDF. IIRC, Hoefler & Co. and Emigre do this (though it's been years since I've looked, so I may have changed this). Their rationale is that since it's possible to extract font from a PDF, they need to pay for any font piracy that results from that.
(never mind that anyone who wants to pirate the font would just go and find a torrent instead of ripping it out of a PDF... and there are torrents of every notable foundry's entire libraries)
You may not like it, neither do I. But what you have there is just rent plain and simple, not rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is when a third party uses force to claim profit from an agreement they're not actually party to.
For example, you rent a business property. You pay the landlord and agree to their terms. Next week the mob shows up and demand protection money to "keep you from harm". Implying that harm will surely come to you unless you pay. That's rent-seeking.
The app store analogy fits rather nicely I think, but it depends on your viewpoint.
> Rent-seeking is when a third party uses force to claim profit from an agreement they're not actually party to.
The agreement is between you and the law in most countries, which says that typefaces are exempt from copyright. The third party are foundries who license fonts to you and charge you more based on how popular your website is.
A typeface is an artistic work and as such is certainly covered by copyright in "most countries". If they were not then why would license agreements even be a thing.
If you don't wish to agree to the license terms of a particular typeface, you have the option to choose another typeface instead. This includes the myriad free typefaces that exist today.
If you buy something from me or strike a license agreement with me, I'm not a "third party" to that transaction.
The most usual is that you'll have to pay a certain price up-front (or monthly), and some more for each access. The odds are also good that you won't be able to host the font yourself, because well, the foundry has to count those access, doesn't it? And if you want the foundry to respond any quickly, you better pay some extra.
The problem isn't designers who need of course compensation for their work, but building up an e-commerce stack, per-volume licensing infra, and publicity, leading to "platforms", verticals, concentration, and most commercial fonts being distributed by just two companies (Adobe and Monotype). In other words, middle-men taking all the money away, when easy self-publishing was the entire point of the web.
(Though I've heard Adobe Stock and iStock at least works ok for photographers and graphic artists for now)
It's rent-seeking if, instead of selling you the font once under a mutually agreeable license, they charge you an ongoing fee to "use" the font under conditions that the foundry controls and can change without re-negotiating the contract. This is especially true if the condition are "you can use for purposes x, y, and z, but if you want to use it for a, b, or c you have to pay a higher rate".
What do you mean? If you agree to the contract when you rented access to the font, you're subject to all its conditions. If you don't want to pay the additional rent, your choice is to break the contract and lose access to the font, or pay up.
