[belorn]

While looking at this from the point of view of AS is helpful to understand the ISP industry, it does not help to understand why giving away things for free is bad.

Lets look at the first thing that springs to mind about giving stuff away for fee: humanitarian aid. If a larger food producer "dump" free food into a region, this will decrease the incentives for local grown food, while driving up prices of alternative source of nutrition. A "evil" organization could, I guess, use humanitarian aid as a method to destroy local industry and cement themselves as the only game in town. The question then becomes, is the concept of humanitarian aid wrong and could there be safeguards that will prevent misuse.

I would suggest that non-profit charity that gives out food, medicin and knowledge is an acceptable line in the sand, while commercial monopolies and for-profit price dumping is bad. This still enables the good aspects of "free", while preventing bad actors from exploiting the side effects of giving away things for free. In the context of Internet this would mean that Wikipedia and similar non-profit information sharing sites would be acceptable, but not for-profit companies like facebook and google.