Sigh. You're serving up html on some port somewhere, probably 80. I do not have any sort of contract with you to fetch everything you link to in your initial ht

Sigh. You're serving up html on some port somewhere, probably 80. I do not have any sort of contract with you to fetch everything you link to in your initial html page. To me that is the crux of it. Any other interpretation denies the physical reality of the web and its underlying infrastructure. > The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it? Depends on how big the site is. I run a very successful web site off my cable modem from home. I pay for the connection anyway to browse, so my serving is effectively free. Not every site needs 15 AWS instances and a load balancer. But to answer your question directly—there will always be people who make sites and host them out of their own pocket for the greater good, or to establish themselves in the industry, or whatever. It's the same reason Free Software exists, even though it doesn't make financial sense at its core.