Of course, giving away free services and goods has been a way to get people into a store (or to a web site) for countless ages. I'm sure that way back in Roman times they gave away free bread or trinkets to get people hook people in, just like web sites do now. But on web "free" seems to have been taken to ludicrous extremes. it seems that everyone wants it for "free". A web site has to offer something, anything, for free to get people to visit. There are entire companies who are entirely devoted to giving away free things. Even such giants as "Yahoo" are almost entirely based upon concept of free giveaways.

Now that Yahoo has announced that it will start charging for auctions, question begs: "is free a thing of past?" Will other sites start charging for things that, outside of internet, they would normally charge for?

Personally, I don't think this is going to happen. One thing that makes internet different from anything we have experienced in past is it's vastness. Someone who is surfing internet literally has billions (and in a half dozen years more like trillions) of choices.

It still boggles my mind when I surf to a Russian or Czechoslovakian site. I still feel a thrill when I find pages from People's Republic of China, Hungary and Vietnam. This is because I grew up during Cold War era, and clearly remember speeches where Ronald Reagan referred to Russia as evil empire. Yet now we can surf their web sites at will, and people in Russia can look at ours as often as they like.

Personally, I think this is true purpose of internet, and it's great promise - to help people communicate with one another. By talking (or sending emails or whatever) we can become more in tune with each other's needs, desires, lifestyles, hopes, dreams and other emotions, which in turn allows us all to understand what's going on and why people act way that they do.

Surfing internet I have come to know people in Russia, one of most powerful countries in world, had to stand in line to get potatoes, something that I eat everyday and take for granted. I have come to tears learning about famines in Africa and felt joy learning of a South African woman's new child. These are experiences that I may never have shared had I not been surfing internet.

However, one of frustrations of this vast melding of cultures and communications is language. Many of these pages, emails and postings are written in languages which are not known to me. I am sure that virtually everyone has felt same frustration of seeing a wonderful web page and not being able to understand what author was attempting to communicate.