We Have Reached the End of Free
In the beginning, the web was a free bonanza. Now every site tries to sign you up for a monthly subscription.
There was a time when it seemed like everything was free on the internet.
Free email. Free hosting. Free software. Free cloud storage. Free photo storage. Every social media site was free as was every search engine and every news site. The software that powered the servers running the web was free. If anywhere was the land of the free, it was the internet. Some free things weren’t even free enough. There were degrees of free-ness: “free” as in beer, or “free” as in speech. And we gobbled it all up. “‘Free is a special price,” Bruce Schneier wrote in Data and Goliath, “there has been all sorts of psychological research showing that people don’t act rationally around it.”
We didn’t act rationally.
Some said that if something was free-as-in-speech, they’d be prepared to pay for it. But most of us came for the freebies. The liberty that open-source licenses afforded was an optional extra. How many downloaded Firefox or GIMP and started changing the underlying code? The vast majority were simply pleased there was no price tag. If your digital ambitions were modest, you could do everything you wanted online without spending a penny.
