It's hard for people to remember now, but in the early days of the web the assumption was that eventually everyone would get online through a free internet access program. People expected the monetary value in the internet to be derived not from those who browsed, but from advertisers who would make a lot of money from all these surfers. So advertisers would support the infrastructure, while users would click on ads as they themselves gained access to knowledge, which was unlike anything that had been available before.
The idea seems kind of utopian now, but offering free web access was briefly employed as a marketing tool by several corporations. You just need to enter the search term "free internet access" into search tool at cnet and several articles spring up. One of these describes how, in mid-2000, Ameritrade offered free web to anyone who would put Ameritrade's navigation bar on their screens. This bar would have ads that led back to the company's own site. E*Trade did the same thing, offering free DSL internet to some of its customers.
Free internet access offers seemed to fail for one reason or another; most of the time it was because the sponsor behind the program went belly-up. Remember that this all occurred during the halcyon days of the dot-com bubble, when venture capital was invested in web companies in the belief that they would rake in spectacular profits as the web exploded. Many an internet service provider (ISP) leapt on the bandwagon, believing they could participate in this profit-making in some way. And some free services were simply bought up and shut down by ISPs who made money through paying customers rather than ad revenue.
So what really happened to the free internet access program? One problem was the failure of the advertising model, as people resolutely did not click on web ads. Even when some websites pleaded with their users to do so, for the sake of revenue, there was little cooperation. Why subject yourself to ads when you could get access to knowledge you wanted whether you clicked or not? And of course, the collapse of the dot-com bubble also spelled the end of the "free internet" dream. This has left everyone with the new model, where service providers require payment in cold, hard cash before anyone can get online.
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