I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've come to this conclusion:

Free (as in beer) is the enemy of free (as in freedom). It's the enemy of privacy, security, and human dignity as well.

In the beginning there was the bubble. Well, actually there was DARPANet and such, but our story begins with the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.

In the early 90s the Internet hit mainstream. I was there. I got online (first by umm... borrowing accounts at my local university at 14) in 1992, then moved to a legal ISP when such things became available in my area. I basically watched the whole thing unfold.

When the Internet and the WWW went big there was a huge flurry of innovation, lots and lots of companies and open source efforts and various DIY projects and personal home pages and everything else.

The small scale stuff was -- and often could be -- a volunteer effort. To this day there are millions of independent sites and blogs and OSS projects. But the big stuff was expensive.

Building a site that is usable, content-rich, curated, and available for hundreds of millions of visitors is expensive. Building massive services like search engines is expensive. Building really high quality software is expensive. Making the gears turn is often the easy part... the polish that it takes to make something great often takes at least twice as long as it takes to do the "techie" stuff and get a working prototype.

There was always a search for ways to make it pay, ways to finance the new medium, but in the beginning it didn't feel urgent. We were building the future, and damn the torpedoes. (By now I was doing it for my day job, so I was there in the trenches coding up early dynamic sites in PHP and Java, playing with Linux, hacking network code in C.)

Lots of things were tried: early freemium models, paywalls and subscriptions, and of course ads.

Only ads worked.

Freemium can work but only if your costs per user are super-low, which they aren't for content creators or computationally expensive or bandwidth-heavy centralized services.

Paywalls and subscriptions? Nobody wanted to pay. Everyone wants free. Total failure.

Then the bubble popped and all the companies that couldn't find a way to make it pay went out of business. The only ones left standing were those who used the Internet as a secondary channel (print magazines and such) and ad-driven sites and services.

But wait... it gets worse.

Ads work but they don't. People, it turns out, hated intrusive ads, popup ads, and ad clutter in general. Ads were the only way to make the net pay (for most non-b2b businesses), but the more ads you have the uglier your site becomes. Back then they started calling it "portalitis" -- named after the buzz-word "portal" for sites like Yahoo and ICQ (remember that?) that became ad-encrusted messes.

Then Google appeared. They dropped everyone's jaws when they launched with a search engine that not only worked but was incredibly clean. I remember seeing it... a text box and "search." That's it. Lots of people think PageRank was responsible for Google's success, but I think the clean site was a lot of it... maybe as much as half of it.

The techies loved it. The users loved it. But the business folks, I'm sure, were like "huh?!? how!!!?!?"

I'm not sure if Google planned their model or figured it out as they went, but eventually they did introduce ads. The ads were targeted, mixed into results and clearly marked. People clicked them because they were relevant. Genius. Google conquered the world.

Google also did something else. They demonstrated a new and now trendy Silicon Valley business approach: launch a free service everyone loves, get a ton of users, then figure out how to monetize.

It's that approach combined with the information needed to underpin finer and finer grained ad targeting that led to the real disaster.

The real disaster wasn't ads. Ads are fine. The real disaster was surveillance as the business model of the Internet.

Facebook was the second massive company to follow in Google's footsteps business-wise with launch first, get big, then monetize. Google kind of tiptoed into the surveillance business model by way of their ad targeting needs, but Facebook found that mass surveillance was the only way to really monetize. Again I'm not sure if Zuckerberg had this in mind from the get-go or not. I tend to think not. But how else do you monetize a massively expensive to run centralized social networking site where everyone just happens to post all kinds of personal data?

The Internet, which was supposed to be our great liberator and engine of learning, became George Orwell's bidirectional TV set. It's a TV set that watches you.

... and it all goes back to free.

The need to be free (as in beer) has led to a dystopian nightmare. That's because I'm sorry folks, but nothing is actually free. It has to be paid for somehow. Governments do it with taxes. But private entities? They've had to get creative.

Unless we somehow challenge "free," I think it's only going to get worse. Surveillance will get worse. Google Glass failed but it's not the end... pretty soon there will be an effort to normalize the idea of your smartphone turning on its microphone and listening to your conversations. That data will be mined for product name drops.

I'm sure more creative ideas will be explored. I had a nightmarish thought the other night.

Full text analysis and meaning extraction is getting good, and it's only going to get better in the future. How long will it be before Google Docs, Dropbox, etc. start data mining the documents stored on their systems and extracting valuable... umm... information?

Picture this: you're writing a novel. It's a really original plot. Then you see an ad for a Hollywood movie. It is your novel, verbatim. The characters are different but the basic plot points are all there. The story is there.

Gotta monetize those data storage services somehow!

I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it. The market expectation that software should be free leads software writers to look for other ways to monetize, which brings us back to surveillance and data mining. Look at some of the creepy stuff mobile apps can do, for example.

Pay for it, or it pays for you.