The Internet is Free as in Lunch

You find them in the IETF, you will find them at universities and you will find them elsewhere, people who hold that the Internet is/should be free. Now the word free has many connotations. So you will hear that the Internet should be Free as in Beer (so gratis), and or Free as in Speech (so you can say what you like). Just look around you and these statements seem quaint at best. I hold that by aspiring these unrealistic ideals over the Internet makes it Free as in Lunch.

'There is no such thing as a free lunch.' There are always strings attached. By saying that the Internet should be Free one denies the basic economic and political landscape that permeates everything we do. Thinking that these do not apply to the Internet is naive, forcing these ideas on others is dangerous.

Freedom as in beer when applied to a service only happens when someone else pays the bill, i.e. when you are a student at a university or an employee at same. The costs of the Internet are real, someone will have to pay them. Some of these costs could be glossed over when the only way to access the Internet was a 56k modem. With broadband access the costs explode as more and more people actually use the bandwidth more intensively. Any party offering broadband Internet access today will have to face this problem. Naturally the current actions of the telcos to get the money for this from the Google's of the world through extortion is misguided but some way has to be found to cover these costs.

The costs of the bandwidth will end up at the end-user in some shape or form. Thinking that Google is free, of MSN is naive in the extreme. Any website that is offering a complex service apparently for free will have some way to recoup its costs. Such a service will have much equipment to run, software to write and maintain, marketing to do etc. all of this costs money. Google is supported by ads and Google's stock price while MSN is sponsored by ads and Microsoft's war-chest (sales of Windows and Office at monopoly-inflated prices).

As for other apparently free sites, ask yourself the question if you can see a feasible way for them to recoup their costs from you visiting their site. If there isn't there must be hidden strings attached. I agree looking at the world this way makes you really paranoid doing this but it actually is insightful. In the last .com boom and bust we learned that in some cases the hidden strings lead straight to people's pension funds and jobs. There is not much left where that came from, so today the money must come from somewhere else. McAfee is offering the tool siteadvisor that will warn you for sites where the hidden strings are Spyware etc. In some cases the hidden strings are in the form of the personal information you give to the site in order to use it. This information can be used for targeted ads to lure you into impulse purchases. This information can also be used for illegal practices such as identity theft or burglary when you are not at home.

Maintaining that the Internet is free as in beer is dangerous as there are hidden strings attached.

Freedom as in speech depends on being protected from the backlash of your statements. The ability to speak anonymously is a great way to achieve that protection, anything else will depend on the restraint of others not to use the knowledge that they know who you are. A cartoon from 1993 claims that on 'On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog'. That might have been true in the days when the way to get onto the net you were sharing a single UNIX machine with many others that your internet access could not be tracked back to you. Today with personal computers (so IP addresses can be linked to persons) and web-cookies (so different browsing sessions can be linked) people do know you are a dog, and what kind of dog you are, in which area you live and when you will be in need of a new flea collar.

As long as people think they can use the Internet anonymously it is a great way to snoop on its users. Arrests of people based on the websites they visit is no longer something they do in China only. It happens in the 'free' west too. The Internet is a string that people use to hang themselves. Claiming that the Internet is Free as in speech is a dangerous as there are hidden strings attached.

With all these strings attached to its freedom, the Internet is Free as in Lunch. We would do better when we acknowledged the reality and find a way to deal with the fact that the Internet costs money to run and that Internet use is not inherently anonymous.