It was to be expected and very predictable because far too many dot.com enterprises were riding high on investor cash infusions, were long on promises but produced little if any cash flow.

The promise of success never materialized and investors wisely refused to throw good money after bad.

No business can survive having expenses but no revenue. Not even on Internet.

That was "Old Internet" business model.

You could write down an idea for an Internet business on a cocktail napkin and get millions of dollars from eager investors. Reality has finally set in and once FREE businesses are changing their stripes and attempting to charge a fee for their content or services.

Enter "New Internet".

The first quarter of 2001 has seen a rash of companies jumping on "Now We Charge a FEE" bandwagon.

A wide variety of services and content that was once delivered for FREE are now being delivered ONLY if you pay a fee.

This includes such services as web hosting, web site content like current time, weather and date, stock quotes, music files and much more.

Those once FREE services and content were able to be provided because there was a strong advertiser base that paid for show we all enjoyed.

But advertising base has faltered.

Some of big names that now offer new premium services include Yahoo!, http://www.yahoo.com/, eBay, http://www.ebay.com/, and of course, new court ordered changes at Napster, http://www.napster.com/, which made it a legal necessity to charge a fee for their music services.

Bizland.com, http://www.bizland.com/, has always provided web-hosting sites for small businesses, as well as email forwarding, e-commerce packages and marketing tools.

Licklider envisioned a globally interconnected series of computers through which anyone could quickly access data and programs from any site.

This was "seed" which allowed beginning of a long process of experimentation and development that has evolved and matured Internet concepts and technology we take for granted today.

By 1985, Internet was already well established as a "new" technology that could support a broad community of researchers and developers.

This was made greatly possible by military that fundamentally wanted a "communications" system that could operate even in a wartime environment. Other government agencies also recognized potential of Internet.

And, that communication ability, was beginning to be used by other groups for simple daily computer communications - Electronic Mail, better known to all of us as email.

Our federal agencies shared cost of common infrastructure, such as all important transoceanic circuits which allowed "network" to be truly global. They also jointly supported "managed interconnection points" through which networks connect to other networks and pass on info from one to another.

Perhaps this helped to foster Internet Spirit of FREE exchange of information and ideas.