It will be a different story for his 17-year-old daughter, however. Anderson has not yet mustered the courage to tell her that she won't be able to call her friends back home in Wisconsin without paying by the minute.
"I expect there will be a potential backlash once the realization hits," the 41-year-old systems administrator said with a nervous laugh. "One of these days we'll have to deal with it."
So will millions of other people who have come to depend on online services and content as they realize the inevitable: The free ride on the Web is coming to an end.
Some denounce the Net's move toward subscriptions as the death of the first mass medium founded on democratic principles, a digital utopia where social, economic and geographic differences posed no barriers to the open flow of information. Others are more pragmatic, saying it was Pollyannish to have expected the Web's content and services to remain free forever--especially after the Internet bubble burst.
Either way, the introduction of charges may fundamentally alter the course of the medium. This evolution could create a new kind of digital divide linked to one's ability to pay for information and services, giving rise to virtually gated and balkanized communities throughout cyberspace.
"People have gotten used to free information. Schools, low-income people, job hunters--information will be dried up for them," said Jim Carrier, director of Tolerance.org, a Web site run by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. "That's not to say the marketplace wouldn't work, but clearly the promise of the Internet is the democracy of ideas. That becomes less than ideal when some of your best information must require a credit card."
What people like Carrier fear is control of the Web by a handful of megacorporations capable of handling such diverse issues as security, privacy, speed, scale and copyrights in millions of transactions per second. Though countless companies from the New and Old Economies will prosper in this new landscape, many Internet veterans see two familiar names emerging as dominant players: AOL Time Warner and Microsoft.
Both are among the few media and high-tech companies powerful enough to take over large segments of a wholly commercialized Web, though each arrives at this juncture from vastly different origins: one from media and the other from technology.
AOL Time Warner derives its strength from America Online, the largest paid membership on the Internet, and from the massive wealth of content from Time Warner. Microsoft has unrivaled expertise in controlling the software consumers and businesses need to use services and buy products while navigating the Web.
"AOL Time Warner and Microsoft will probably take over some 70 to 80 percent of everything--Web access, Web usage, whatever," predicted Ken Lim, chief futurist of research organization Cybermedia Group and a former employee of Apple Computer and NASA. "An element people are touching on is that it's not the content that's important--it's the functionality."
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