As soon as they start charging, the number of subscribers slumps to hundreds. Surfers don't expect to pay for using the ocean. It all depends on what Evan Schwartz calls 'Webonomics'. There have been some very expensive flops. A lot of big players have lost millions on the Web.
Worried firms do irrational things.
Barnes and Noble, one commentator observed, was behaving like 'someone who comes to a party late and starts throwing drinks at people'. The basic problem is that the system was not designed to sell books, or anything else. It was an elegant concept, and probably far ahead of anything the computer-poor Russians could come up with. Much US military research is done on American campuses, and out of ARPAnet and its derivatives sprang Local Area Networks, connected by ethernet, or telnet programs, using UNIX, a complicated operating system, capable of communicating, via hub-computers, with other colleges. The World Wide Web, son of Internet, was another essentially non-commercial system.