Users looking for free Internet access may be excused for feeling as if they are in the midst of a bonanza. Now Excite@Home has become the latest large provider to announce free dialup Internet access for consumers, the Washington Post reports.
Excite expects the new free access will help attract people to its service and eventually allow the company to successfully market its $40/month high-speed access option to a whole new group of consumers, the Post reports.
Like most of the companies offering free access, Excite plans to offset the cost of supplying that access through advertising. In this business model, most companies supply ads that stay on the user's computer screen while they are on the Internet.
Excite is just the latest company pledging free access. Internet companies such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, NetZero and Juno all have entered into agreements to provide free access.
But is free access unequivocally good for consumers? Some commentators don't think so
ZDNet's Jesse Berst, for instance, outlines what he sees as problems with free Internet access in a recent column on Ziff-Davis' news site. Some of the problems include:
Invasion of privacy, as many services require clients to give them detailed marketing information in exchange for free access;
Most of the new services are dialup services, which means that high-speed connections are not yet possible;
Clients have to look at even more advertising when they're surfing the Net.
However, free access is growing rapidly and is starting to become a more influential part of the Internet. Consumers who don't mind looking at ads all day now have even more options for accessing the wired world for free.
Full text of the Washington Post article is currently found at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/feed/
a16116-2000jan7.htm
Full text of Jesse Berst's Anchordesk column is currently found at:
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_4325.html
