Actually, it's not ignorant of history. "The Internet" as most people know it today, and for easily multiple decades now, has always had ads. It's only back when the BBS boards were the big thing that perhaps you would be correct, but even then you had people trying to make money somehow; usually to pay for the gear they were using to run their own websites, etc and so forth.

Now to be fair to you, by comparison to today, the 'original' internet was by far much "free'er" than it is now since subscription fees and such didn't really exist; but it was never completely free. (*for anyone not just hijacking someone elses connection somehow via wardriving for open wifi and such like that.)

Ultimately you still had to pay a ISP of some sort, or going back far enough your telephone provider for dial up. Though that might be somewhat redundant to split them up since most telecoms tend to provide internet, and ISP's tend to provide some form of telephony now too. I say tend to, since it's not 100% across the board with all of them.

Now to be fair to you, you are technically correct that the internet that was made available to us all back in 1993 was technically 'free', but this is not the kind of technically correct that is the best kind of correct, because ultimately people still immediately started trying to use things like affiliate links and advertisements to pay for their hardware or lifestyles.

That said, there is one caveat I must make clear. In 1993, I would have just been 4 years old, and not using the internet yet. I didn't get on the net until I was roughly 10 years old in 1999, though there was some exposure to it prior due to school and extended family.

But my experience of it back then was that there were ads, and affiliate links. Especially in forums.

But again as I was saying before; a connection to the net required that you pay a middle man such as an ISP or telecom company. So even if 'the net' itself was free in some fashion without all the ways to pay for things and etc; the 'net' itself was not free to access. You still needed that middleman to provide some form of connection for you, provided you weren't joining a local lan or something like that (if I understand correctly) and even that isn't 'the internet'. It's just a personal network between friends.

So for all intents and purposes, my argument is basically correct. The internet has never really been 'free'. CERN may have given it to the world for zero cost to the world, but even that doesn't qualify as 'the net' being free.

For the internet to be truly free, ever, would require that there be zero money being paid to absolutely anyone to be able to access it. This may seem pedantic, but it's important that we use the right words for the right things. To portray the idea that it was ever completely free to access for anyone, anywhere; is to mislead those people.

My older family members certainly did not have access to the internet for free when they got their first computers. Neither did our schools which would gripe about how much it cost them to get decent connections capable of handling the computer labs they had built.

So I digress, but the net was never really free. IT may have been really cheap at one point, and not hounding you for money constantly; but not free. Just like how aerial based NTSC tv in North America also was never really free; but paid for via advertising companies. Sure, you could find ways to watch it for free and never watch a commercial; but it was still paid for somehow by someone.

A few final notes:

1. Anything prior to 1993 would constitute the internet as still being a project and not giving any credence to the idea of the internet being free; since it was still in its developmental stages at that point. It's most early ones at that.

2. The first web purchas through the net, was pizza, in 1994. The first banner ad was also used in 1994; which means the internet had maybe 1 year in total of being 'free' by some arbitrary standard which I do not agree with. Banner ads are a tool for getting attention for something or the other, usually to do with affiliates, or some form of purchase.

3. The same year that the 'internet' was donated by CERN, is also the same year that commercialization of the 'internet' began. So your argument really only applies to the years 1991 and 1992 really; which doesn't matter because ultimately the net was still in its developmental stages still at that point. It was only used mostly for academic purposes; and commercial purposes were not allowable. But because 'the internet' itself should not be seen as the same thing as the project that was the network that Tim Berners Lee was working on; that means that since it's donation in 1993, the internet has never really truly been free. https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

> But in 1993, enlightened regulators and policy makers decided two things at the same time. They decided to amend the AUP to make commercial use legal, and in parallel they decided to hand off the internet backbone to the telecom companies, at the time AT&T, Sprint, and MCI. That solved the economic problem since the government no longer had to pay for it.

And there is pal. Even if you or I were not paying for it out of pocket, the government was. And the government pays for things via the taxes it takes from our pocket. So ... it was never free.

I rest my case.