[Netisneverfree]

That's just it. The internet was never free. There has pretty much always been some method that people have been making money off of creating content for it, in some format or another. Whether it be basic ads, affiliate links, sponsorship spots, or web stores; the internet has always been paid for somehow in some way. And that's before we discuss things like ISP's providing that connection to it in the first place.

People who think the internet is or should be free, are disconnected from reality. I grew up with what we called farmer vision, but others would know it as rabbit ear or aerial tv. You had 3 to maybe 5 basic channels in your area if you were lucky; and they were all paid for by ads... er... commercials. The idea was that the content was technically free, since you didn't really need to watch the commercials. (You could just go to the bathroom, make a snack, get a drink, etc.) But the paid advertisement was paying for that broadcast, and so you ultimately had to put up with your shows being interrupted.

YouTube does nothing different, really. Yet look at all the flak they get for their usage of the same methodology.

The internet was never free, has never been free, and never will be free. You will always be paying for it somehow; whether it be out of pocket, via attention, or your data. TV was no different, up to the data part; and set-top boxes changed that too. Once those could phone home and report usage, especially to thwart piracy; your data became another potential sales figure for even the tv stations.

I personally would much rather we have an internet culture where we don't mind paying for the things we like, and want to see continue to exist. This would essentially democratize the internet; though it may also induce a segregation of the unwealthy from being able to participate... but those people tend to be children and the poor. Children don't pay for anything, their parents do. And if the poor or their parents don't have enough money to pay for 1-10$ subscriptions on a monthly basis; then they have much more serious things to consider. Like getting a job, or a better paying one. Not their usage of the internet.

Besides, if they already are paying for a basic connection, they shouldn't have much trouble paying for the few things they enjoy to use. Alternatively, they could opt-in to be a data source for free access or something like that. Or see more ads per hour. Keep it more open for everyone.

But that still goes to prove the point. The net is not free. Never has been, never will be. So we would be wise to setup a good culture around it while we still can, before the greediest of us start to make it terrible for everyone, and not just the poor.

I like the concept that Brave browser uses for this reason. It's just too bad that with the way things are going with crypto right now, that it's going to get some bad rep from it likely. Also doesn't help that the devs behind it are... less than stellar. But that's another can of worms aside from this giant one.

[lmm]

This is just false, and profoundly ignorant of history. There was a time when the net was free, and it worked well; whether to allow commercial use of the net at all was a big debate in the early days.

[Netisneverfree]

Actually, it's not ignorant of history. "The Internet" as most people know it today, and for easily multiple decades now, has always had ads. It's only back when the BBS boards were the big thing that perhaps you would be correct, but even then you had people trying to make money somehow; usually to pay for the gear they were using to run their own websites, etc and so forth.

Now to be fair to you, by comparison to today, the 'original' internet was by far much "free'er" than it is now since subscription fees and such didn't really exist; but it was never completely free. (*for anyone not just hijacking someone elses connection somehow via wardriving for open wifi and such like that.)

Ultimately you still had to pay a ISP of some sort, or going back far enough your telephone provider for dial up. Though that might be somewhat redundant to split them up since most telecoms tend to provide internet, and ISP's tend to provide some form of telephony now too. I say tend to, since it's not 100% across the board with all of them.

Now to be fair to you, you are technically correct that the internet that was made available to us all back in 1993 was technically 'free', but this is not the kind of technically correct that is the best kind of correct, because ultimately people still immediately started trying to use things like affiliate links and advertisements to pay for their hardware or lifestyles.

That said, there is one caveat I must make clear. In 1993, I would have just been 4 years old, and not using the internet yet. I didn't get on the net until I was roughly 10 years old in 1999, though there was some exposure to it prior due to school and extended family.

But my experience of it back then was that there were ads, and affiliate links. Especially in forums.

But again as I was saying before; a connection to the net required that you pay a middle man such as an ISP or telecom company. So even if 'the net' itself was free in some fashion without all the ways to pay for things and etc; the 'net' itself was not free to access. You still needed that middleman to provide some form of connection for you, provided you weren't joining a local lan or something like that (if I understand correctly) and even that isn't 'the internet'. It's just a personal network between friends.

So for all intents and purposes, my argument is basically correct. The internet has never really been 'free'. CERN may have given it to the world for zero cost to the world, but even that doesn't qualify as 'the net' being free.

For the internet to be truly free, ever, would require that there be zero money being paid to absolutely anyone to be able to access it. This may seem pedantic, but it's important that we use the right words for the right things. To portray the idea that it was ever completely free to access for anyone, anywhere; is to mislead those people.

My older family members certainly did not have access to the internet for free when they got their first computers. Neither did our schools which would gripe about how much it cost them to get decent connections capable of handling the computer labs they had built.

So I digress, but the net was never really free. IT may have been really cheap at one point, and not hounding you for money constantly; but not free. Just like how aerial based NTSC tv in North America also was never really free; but paid for via advertising companies. Sure, you could find ways to watch it for free and never watch a commercial; but it was still paid for somehow by someone.

A few final notes:

1. Anything prior to 1993 would constitute the internet as still being a project and not giving any credence to the idea of the internet being free; since it was still in its developmental stages at that point. It's most early ones at that.

2. The first web purchas through the net, was pizza, in 1994. The first banner ad was also used in 1994; which means the internet had maybe 1 year in total of being 'free' by some arbitrary standard which I do not agree with. Banner ads are a tool for getting attention for something or the other, usually to do with affiliates, or some form of purchase.

3. The same year that the 'internet' was donated by CERN, is also the same year that commercialization of the 'internet' began. So your argument really only applies to the years 1991 and 1992 really; which doesn't matter because ultimately the net was still in its developmental stages still at that point. It was only used mostly for academic purposes; and commercial purposes were not allowable. But because 'the internet' itself should not be seen as the same thing as the project that was the network that Tim Berners Lee was working on; that means that since it's donation in 1993, the internet has never really truly been free. https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

> But in 1993, enlightened regulators and policy makers decided two things at the same time. They decided to amend the AUP to make commercial use legal, and in parallel they decided to hand off the internet backbone to the telecom companies, at the time AT&T, Sprint, and MCI. That solved the economic problem since the government no longer had to pay for it.

And there is pal. Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was. And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket. So ... it was never free.

I rest my case.

[lmm]

> But again as I was saying before; a connection to the net required that you pay a middle man such as an ISP or telecom company. So even if 'the net' itself was free in some fashion without all the ways to pay for things and etc; the 'net' itself was not free to access. You still needed that middleman to provide some form of connection for you, provided you weren't joining a local lan or something like that (if I understand correctly) and even that isn't 'the internet'. It's just a personal network between friends.

The early net worked much the same way as a personal network between friends. If you wanted to join, you could run your own cable to someone who was connected; charging for connections and data transfer came much later. Of course someone had to rig and maintain a cable (or make regular phone connections, or what have you), and wires don't grow on trees, but this wasn't on a commercial basis in the early days; it was a research project for some but mostly just a thing cool people did; those who could contributed and those who couldn't didn't, like a potluck.

> 1. Anything prior to 1993 would constitute the internet as still being a project and not giving any credence to the idea of the internet being free; since it was still in its developmental stages at that point. It's most early ones at that.

Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

> Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was.

The government was one entity among many that ran parts of the net in some countries. They may have ran the biggest and most important connections, but they weren't the whole thing; the whole point of the net is that it's a network, with no single point of failure.

> And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket.

Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

[Netisneverfree]

> The early net worked much the same way as a personal network between friends. If you wanted to join, you could run your own cable to someone who was connected; charging for connections and data transfer came much later. Of course someone had to rig and maintain a cable (or make regular phone connections, or what have you), and wires don't grow on trees, but this wasn't on a commercial basis in the early days; it was a research project for some but mostly just a thing cool people did; those who could contributed and those who couldn't didn't, like a potluck.

That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

> Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

To be fair though, this is much closer to the internet we ended up with than the prior mentioned LAN (Local Area Network).

And to be fair again, you could technically make your own internet or maybe more accurately 'intranet' via LAN, but it still would not be the world wide internet as we knew it back then, or today.

> The government was one entity among many that ran parts of the net in some countries. They may have ran the biggest and most important connections, but they weren't the whole thing; the whole point of the net is that it's a network, with no single point of failure.

Let me tell you about backbone connections then. If those go down, basically everyone's internet is down. Depends on which ones, which goes hand in hand with your comment here; but ultimately if the right backbones connections go down, it may as well be a shut down of the entire internet since many areas won't be able to access other areas networks; and due to the massive influx of people trying to figure out what's going on, a sort of DDoS of sorts will ensue from all those attempts to connect to whatever else remains online. If it can be connected to at all. For example, Google. Google has world wide servers, and thus can be connected to from almost anywhere. But if the backbones are down, then only local connections might be able to ping google. Pinging google is a typical way for people to test if they have a working connection. That or cloudflare with 1.1.1.1 for a quick ping test when google isn't the quick resort. The point?

Well, if everyone starts trying to ping the only connections available to their area, then those servers better be able to take that sudden congestion, which will result in the internet essentially going down for everyone. There are caveats I admit, but the point here is that the internet is not quite as failure redundant as you seem to think it is. If it was, we would have cellular backhaul being used to ensure that at least basic connections can be made for information purposes and emergencies. But that would require world wide 5G and 6G cellular to be used. Which I guarantee you would not be free.

> Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

Truth be told, I understand your reticence to agree with this, since the way governments do things in different countries can make this difficult to talk about. But the basic premise is this. The government's coffers are filled via 2 main sources. Taxes, and Investments of some sort. A 3rd form exists in the case of lobbying and bribes, but that's a different beast all together.

In general, public services tend to be paid for via the taxes the government takes from our pocket, and so regardless of what name is attached to that money given, like in the case of America with its department of defense; that money did ultimately contain some portion or majority made up of tax payer money.

But to say there is no real connection between these two actions just shows me that you may need to expand your thinking on this subject matter, because it's more nuanced than you seem to think, if you think government provided stuff is free.

It's not. That money paying for it comes from us all in some form or another.

That said, there is a caveat here as well. America providing internet to North America did mean that Canadians getting to use the connections at the earliest points would have been getting something of a free service to some degree; since Canadians like me didn't really put money into that via our taxes. But through trade agreements and other such things, our government probably did contribute to it in some way; and so our taxes did contribute in some manner. It's hard to say without going through all the fine point details. But suffice to say; nothing government provides is truly free. It's paid for somehow. Even if they just print off more dollars, we pay for that printing via inflation and higher costs due to it.

Nothing, is free.

[lmm]

> That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

Technically it's an internet when the cable runs between two distinct networks. But the point is that it all ran on the same principle in the early days.

> That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'.

You originally said "the net". Which in the early days would generally have meant UUCPNET (itself an informal concept) or even just the vaguer notion of "all the computers that are connected one way or another to each other". Either way, it remains something that was well developed long before 1993.

> Let me tell you about backbone connections then. If those go down, basically everyone's internet is down. Depends on which ones, which goes hand in hand with your comment here; but ultimately if the right backbones connections go down, it may as well be a shut down of the entire internet since many areas won't be able to access other areas networks

If you cut enough connections then you can disconnect the net, cutting it into two or more pieces (and on a small enough scale that happens all the time, as computers on the edge with only one connection do that). But no single connection is an essential part of the net; the concept of a "backbone" is something we use to try to understand the network, not an actual distinction between different types of connection. The US government ran major high-bandwidth connections; without them the net would have been a lot slower and more congested. But it would still have worked; messages still got through eventually when the "backbones" were down.

> There are caveats I admit, but the point here is that the internet is not quite as failure redundant as you seem to think it is. If it was, we would have cellular backhaul being used to ensure that at least basic connections can be made for information purposes and emergencies. But that would require world wide 5G and 6G cellular to be used. Which I guarantee you would not be free.

You can make your connection to the internet more reliable by connecting to more different nodes - whether by traditional wires, radio, or something else. (Although these days they'll probably charge you for it). That's how the core of the network works - lots of "peers" connected to each other - and always has, and that's why any single network (even the US government) can go down and not take the whole internet with it.

> Nothing, is free.

Do you believe it's impossible to have a free potluck picnic? Ultimately it has always taken labour and material to run the net, but in the early days that happened noncommercially and without charging people. Unless you define "free" so narrowly that nothing is free by definition, which would make it a rather useless concept, the net was free.

[matai_kolila]

Do you know what a Gish gallop is?

With a new account you lack the credibility for me to trust that's not what you're doing here with these very long comments.

Ironic, coming from me, but I make new accounts for privacy reasons, not each time I want to make a comment.

[dang]

We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines in another thread. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860465.

I'm duplicating this information here because the other thread was a few days older and the point of replying is to let people know that their account is banned.

[Netisneverfree]

I do now.

But that is not what I am doing.

I am doing what is more similar to what you claim to do. This is essentially a throw-away account, since I have found that on social media that the only reason why an account might persist, is because it conforms to the mainstream.

I do not conform to the mainstream, and for good reason. Not to mislead, but to help enlighten; presuming my opinion is enlightened at all proper and true. Regardless of that though, it requires doing things somewhat outside the box. So I understand your miss take on my intent.

Edit: I would add this. If anything else, if my commentary has made you or anyone else think about subject matters beyond their own opinions and comes to a better truth than either of us knew before; then my intent is still served.

[satvikpendem]

Please don't make new accounts just to reply to a particular comment.

[Netisneverfree]

For what reason do you figure this is the case?

[sverona]

You and GP are conflating libre and gratis.

The Internet is probably the most ambitious infrastructure project ever conceived. Of course it's not free the way sunlight is free.

I dream of a world in which things like YouTube outright do not exist because everyone has the know-how to run their own servers, connected by mesh network. Maybe then we'd actually support the people who make things we enjoy instead of giving like 30% to whatever platform they happen to be advertising on.

Of course this discussion sidesteps all the various atrocities of late capitalism.

[Netisneverfree]

First of all, we dream of the same world. I myself am constantly teaching myself many things to achieve this dream for myself at the very least; but it's a long process.

That said, I would like to make very clear that I am not conflating 'liberty and thus freedom' or Libre as you put it with 'free of charge' or Gratis.

Thing is, anything government touches requires funds somehow, and pretty much (but not always) anything government pays for is being paid for via the populous somehow. Even in the case of 'printing money' or quantitative easing as they like to call it on the media; the incurred inflation is a payment we the populous must endure via higher prices and anything else that comes from it. So even if the cost via dollars is low or 'gratis', we still pay for it via some other form anyways/as well.

As I just said to the other fellow, "nothing, is free". I say that in double speak, because ultimately only nothing itself is free in entirety, but also nothing in life is ever truly free as in gratis as you put it.

Even the air we breath is not free, since by taking in a breath ourselves, we take a breath that could be the breath taken by someone else. it seems free (gratis) because we do not immediately pay for it out of pocket or in some mental or physical situation; but in due time with enough humans born and living on earth you can get ready to expect to pay to breath. Atmosphere will become a finite resource that we will need to pay for to breath, because we cannot get people to stop having children without stepping on their rights and liberty (libre).

I think this does well enough in showing I know the difference of libre and gratis. But you may still disagree. That's fine. I don't expect agreement on social media site and anything else of the like. I am merely sharing my opinion on the matter in language that is most likely to be understood by a majority of people. That means keeping things at a more understandable level for folk, and that means not getting pedantic about things like libre and gratis; though you are right that it matters.

See, I dream of yet another reality. One where no one is allowed to graduate high school until they can prove they have at least a grade 10 reading and writing level. As it is right now, most people only have something to sufficiently call a grade 6 level. And that's native speakers of the language, not foreign.

That's abysmal. And folk like you and me get to put up with it. That's the disgusting thing about it all.

But we instead focus on things like late stage capitalism; while people don't even know the proper definitions of the words they use. Example?

Proletariat, Bourgeoisies, and Sovereign; which of these are you? Which of these am I?

Due to the use of the French definitions by much of society today, and not the original latin ones from Rome, we get the confusion I am about to describe.

These words are used incorrectly by a lot of people, because they see themselves as 'the worker' and thus 'Proletariat'. But in reality, many of us 'workers' are living lives that put us in 'the middle class' in some form, which makes us 'Bourgeoisies' as per the original definition. And then there are the nincompoops who consider themselves Sovereign of the Land and stuff like that, but that's a whole new ball game. Sovereign by definition is 'the ruling class, or nobility'.

In reality, 'Proletarius' the root of Proletariat is the proper use of the term, which is 'lowest class'.

Many of us who would consider ourselves to be the Proletariat under the French definition would be incorrect by standards of the Romans, because we are not truly the lowest class. That belongs to the homeless. If you are sitting in a nice cozy abode with food in your belly and enough money to get by on a monthly basis or better; you are not the lowest class even if it feels like it.

Bourgeoisies doesn't have such a problem attached to it, since it's purely a French term as far as I understand. But it does have a root in the original term Bourgeois. The thing is that this is a good example of how words and definitions attached to them change over the times to suit the people, and not the original intent of the creators of those words. It has gone from 'middle class' to 'upper class'.

This is purely in my opinion just done by certain types in society who wish to push their agendas without coming up with good arguments to support them. So they change the rules instead. And it works, quite cleverly too; because many people aren't really that educated due to lack of paying attention in school and stuff like not holding kids back a grade or two when they really need to be.

And so we get situations like people mistaking corporatism with late-stage capitalism.

According to: http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/diff...

> Capitalism is a social and economic system which recognizes individual rights, including the right to own properties and the possession of goods for the individual’s personal consumption. Corporatism, on the other hand, is a form of economy that was created as an option to socialism and intends to achieve social justice and equality without the need to take away private property from individual members of society. It stresses the positive role that government has in ensuring social justice while restraining social unrest as people look after their self-interests.

---

Which of these sounds more familiar to today's situation?

Should be Corporatism would be your answer. But then, you could also say that Corporatism is just another facet of late stage capitalism, and I would not be in entire disagreement with you; since unbridled capitalism combined with misunderstandings of things like Liberty under the guise of positive and negative liberty... (which I disagree with as notions since there are no such things; only neutral liberty exists) will result in the very existence of Corporatism.

Anyways. To finish off. Sovereign: Latin term is Sover or 'above/super'. French and English terms combined French Soverain and English Regin to create Sovereign.

It's only meaning really is to denote that something is far above other things. It can technically be used to say things like "This is the best method to do this thing" replacing 'best' with sovereign or even as simple as sover. But it's such a dated use, and not really part of our lexicon anymore to the point where even spellcheck thinks it's a wrong word lol.

But due to its constant changing and misuse by people too proletarius in terms of use of language, the rest of us sover speakers of language get to deal with the situations that our voted and elected bourgeois push upon us.

By the original definition, I just used bourgeois wrong, but by the way it is used today, I used it correctly.

So don't misunderstand me here. I understand why you draw the difference between libre and gratis.

But because most people aren't educated properly to begin with, I use the common tongue they understand instead. I hope this all helps explain it thoroughly.

[sverona]

That's a high horse you've gotten on. "Proper definitions" are subjective. Marx's definitions of proletariat and bourgeoisie --- colloquially, working-class and owning-class --- survive today more or less unchanged. In French bourgeoisie means something else. In Rome, thousands of years ago, proletarius meant something else. Definitions are social objects that change with society.

The folks that deploy this terminology today largely work in exploitative jobs at corporations owned by people with more money than they can dream of. They are forced to suffer because someone else owns the infrastructure. The same phenomenon happens with nonfree (gratis, but not libre) software full of adverts and dark patterns. YouTube, for instance, is what it is because Google has fuck-you amounts of storage to house everyone's videos and makes enough money to offset the cost of that storage. It's not hard to imagine a free (libre) alternative. That's all I'm saying.