Forget Gmail, it's a distraction at best. I have said this many times: the Internet, as it bloomed starting around 1990 or so, was built on someone else's hard

Forget Gmail, it's a distraction at best. I have said this many times: the Internet, as it bloomed starting around 1990 or so, was built on someone else's hardware. Usenet, sure. If you were on IRC at the time, chances are your IRC servers were .edu servers. At first the "someone else's hardware" (SEH) was largely from universities, who often had no real top-down policies about how their bandwidth and such were used. Many SPARCs were pressed into service. Roughly a quarter of a second after the invention of the <img> tag, advertising began to be a thing. Anyone remember NetZero? The banner era began, then animated .GIFs were added, and finally the CPU-crushing Flash banner evolved. Take a moment to remember NetZero, as well as the free hours on AOL discs so numerous the US postal service shuddered. About a thousand people invented AJAX as soon as they realized the implications of the XMLHttpRequest object. Just as the <img> tag was the four-color print for advertising, so this began an era where, with the addition of cookies, you could get more information about how your ads were received, how your viewer moved across domains, and so on. This in turn means you can ask for more money for advertising, after all you can target and track! Before it was merely exposure. Ah, but how to know more? Well, for one, you could have the users host all of their content on your servers. First email, then photos, then video. Why not? And it's all for free. We just need to perform sophisticated analysis on your content, then decide to show you this Viagra ad anyway. This more or less ends at Cloud Computing. I submit that the various frees and SEHs have created radical distortions in the mindset of generations when it comes to "Who pays for this, anyway?" It's certainly devalued some kinds of labor, overvalued others, and probably has some knock-on effects that we might not even immediately notice. I think the need for Cloudflare and other anti-DDoS products stems from the overly casual egress filtering of various ISPs. It's all just free stuff, anyway, let someone else pay for it. Email is "free," and we've largely dealt with spam by building some great machinery (eventually) and hiding it away from everyone, but its big brother, Internet Scam Sam, continues to slither along. We now build to scale and simply make tech support some forum where the users attempt to solve each other's problems -- they're not even interns. I could go on and on, but my key point is that thirty-plus years of "free" has translated to "someone else's problem" and I wonder if we aren't starting to see some bills come due at last.