By Jeremy Schlosberg

  Yesterday, Excite@Home announced a new service called FreeWorld, which provides free, ad-supported internet access. 
    This is only the most recent of a series of well-publicized free internet access services launched.
   Juno announced free web access as part of its basic free email package back on Dec. 20. And AltaVista pioneered the idea of a major portal offering free internet access with its introduction of a service called Free Access in August.
    Not to be left out of the internet-for-free publicity, AltaVista took the opportunity to announce yesterday that its free internet service now has 1.5 million users.
   Both AltaVista’s and Excite’s free services are powered by a company called 1stUp.com, itself a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, which is also AltaVista’s parent.
   This new flurry of free-access activity comes on the heels of a report released at the end of the year by market researcher Datamonitor that made a startling claim that all internet service will be free by Christmas of this year.
     With all the recent announcements, the question of whether all internet service will soon be free seems more relevant that ever. 
       It also has some interesting implications.  The notion of free service carries with it the idea that once the service is free huge numbers of Americans who are not now on the web will promptly jump on. 
    Suddenly, the web would go from being a medium for the elite and well educated to virtually a mass medium, or close to it. It would follow the model of broadcast TV, moving away from the model of cable and magazines.
     And if that were to take place, all sorts of advertising opportunities would open up.
      But is it really going to happen? If so, what’s driving it? And what if anything is standing in the way?
    In conversation, Datamonitor analyst Rob Shavell clarifies his company’s proclamation—what Datamonitor is referring to is basic dial-up internet service. There is no prediction here, for instance, that AOL will be free by year’s end.
    That said, Shavell is otherwise adamant.
   "We believe that there’s firm support in the marketplace to assert that basic dial-up access will be price point zero within 12 months," he says.
    Not everyone buys it, however.
   "We disagree with Datamonitor's prediction," says Sam Alfstad, editor of eMarketer, a web company that analyzes and aggregates information about internet usage. "Not only will there still be paid internet access by Christmas 2000, the paying population will be considerably larger."
     Alfstad points to the relatively slow-going free access has had so far in the U.S., as well as problems the idea has been running into lately in the UK.
   "The continued growth of AOL shows that people are quite willing to pay a reasonable amount for quality service—more willing to do that than accept interruptions for ‘free,’" says Alfstad. "Business users will also demand higher quality access and be quite happy to pay for uninterrupted service."
    eMarketer analysts aren’t the only ones dubious of Datamonitor’s prediction.
    Jupiter Communications issued a report in November that asserts that even by 2003 only 13 percent of online users will be accessing the internet through a free ISP.
     "Free ISP services will carve out a sustainable niche within the dial-up world but will fail to displace the traditional paid access model over the next four years," says the Jupiter report.
    The ongoing question seems to be whether the increase in traffic that is assumed to result from free access will compensate the ISP enough to make up for lost subscription revenue. The Jupiter report notes that advertising-supported free access will by far be the dominant free access model.
    But is free access likely to cause any significant increase in the online population? 
   Clearly that’s the intent, says Datamonitor’s Shavell. "But I think it’s questionable whether this strategy is going to work.
    "I don’t see free access causing that much if any increase in the number of users," he says. "And this is a scary implication for everyone on the net. When the new customer pipe dries up, business plan projections for 2002, ’03 and ’04 get harder and harder to validate," he says.
    So yet again we face the potential reality that by and large most people who are going to be online already are.
    In which case the push towards free access here in the U.S. becomes a curiously limbo-like phenomenon, neither ready to take over nor disappear. Existing internet users have more important concerns than costs; they’re not as a group clamoring for free service, they’re clamoring for reliable and effective service. Existing non-users, on the other hand, don’t seem to be interested in being online, whether it’s free or not.
    "The basic question will come down to convenience and control," says Alfstad. "We believe consumers will prove willing to pay to maintain both."

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.