Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area cod

Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100. For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly. A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include. Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.