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> Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind. Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all w

> Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind. Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and talk to anyone. I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been when browsers started behaving according to some kind of documented standard. Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing nag modals. Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads! I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.

JohnBooty 4y ago
I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it. That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths. But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce. Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.