i was shocked enough by the story about another.com giving a ransom demand to it’s existing users to go and post it over at the end of free. another.com are a webmail provider who have been charging for their services to new users since last november. they’ve decided that existing users also ought to pay £15 a year to get their mail too. what’s shocking is that they’ve given users just three days to pay up or lose their email accounts.

i have no problem with paying for things on the web, in fact at the moment i’m getting irritated - mainly silently - with people who seem to think everything ought to be free. it takes time, effort and cold hard cash to do anything on the web and i don’t think anybody has a right to take it for granted that it’s free.

yahoo groups are, almost certainly, soon to launch a premium service and i see two different sides to this on the web. there are those who use the service as part of a commericial enterprise who are happy to be offered the option to pay for something more reliable and to be able to remove adverts from their pages. and then there are those who think being asked to pay for something that’s been free up to now is atrocious.

i think that the big problem with what they are trying to do now is that they are trying to offer a cut down version of what they currently offer for free as a premium service. the message archiving limits they are offering on the paid for service would cut one of my groups archives down to a couple of months worth of messages where we currently have over two years worth online for free. and the free service would cut them down so we wouldn’t be able to find the beginnings of conversations we are still having. i do think it’s fair to say “sorry, this all can’t be free” but i don’t think what they are doing is fair either. if they are going to charge, and i think they should charge, we should at least have an option to continue to get the level of service we have now even if it involves paying extra to have extensive archives stored, or to have lots of photos stored, and so on.

i also think it’s bad that yahoo groups are considering “no ads” to be a separate issue to “premium service”. when you think about it it’s only the same idea as a print magazine - you pay for it but you still get advertised at - but the idea leaves a sour taste when applied the web. it can be done differently here, so why don’t we do things differently?

the way yahoo are raising this idea has also got my knickers in a twist. i’m on lists where people are saying “well i’d have to leave if we had to pay because i can’t afford it”. this misses the whole concept of community which is what yahoo groups is all about. the charges shouldn’t be down to any individual but down to the list as a whole. whilst commercial users of yahoo groups might want to pay for their lists, there needs to be a way for communities to pay as a whole so those members who want to pay can pay and no one gets left out for lack of funds.

in summary, what i’m trying to say in a rather longwinded way, is that there is no divine right to free things on the web but that when things are moved from free to paying services it ought to be done in a way that doesn’t involve people to pay for a degraded service or being subjected to ransom and that even though the web isn’t a free thing the cost ought to be borne by users as a whole rather than users inividually. one of the good things about the “free web” that we’ve been used to is that once you’ve crossed the digital divide and got online there aren’t many divisions here and i don’t want to see them created.