It’s hard for people to remember now, but in the early days of the internet 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 internet 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 www.cnet.com and several articles spring up. One of these describes how, in mid-2000, Ameritrade offered free internet to anyone who would put Ameritrade’s navigation bar on their screens.