I read somewhere recently that the direction the internet is heading is towards everything being free - and I have been discovering recently just how true this is. Nobody anymore pays for an email address, unless they really want to. The most popular browser that people choose to use to surf the web is free - Firefox, which comes from an organisation called Mozilla, which also produces a range of other browsers including a more Mac-friendly version, Camino, as well as a “full internet suite” version, Seamonkey. If you don’t like Firefox you can use Opera, if you don’t like either of them you can use Netscape, and if you particularly want to upload photos to the web you can use Flock. All without parting with a cent.

If you want to set up your own website you can have it hosted for free by most of the free email providers - Yahoo, or Google, say, or even Microsoft (at Livespaces). If you want to create a blog, Google (through Blogger) or wordpress will host it for you for free - or if you prefer wordpress will, as with this blog, let you use their software to host it on your own website.

Nobody pays for online “chat” services, whether you’re using MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Googlechat or any other chat account - in fact so much so that those chat applications have expanded to the point where they can also offer you for free things that we’re used to having to pay for, like phone calls - and in fact they’ll go further, also offering you the facility for free video phone calls or video conferencing.

Google has launched a whole package of free applications - and have even more available. When I recently needed to re-size a photo, after much investigation discovering that nothing on my own computer seemed to be capable of doing it for me, in the end I simply typed “resize photo free” into Google, which immediately took me to a website which quickly and simply did that for me, for free.

The internet will give you a free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

And I recently discovered that you can now get for free a whole alternative to Microsoft Word and its entire Office suite of applications - openoffice.org or NeoOffice (the Mac version) - on which I am now in fact writing this. Its developers claim that it is not only totally interchangeable with Microsoft office, but offers the features of the latest version of Micosoft office, even where these have not yet been released by Microsoft (such as Microsoft Office 2007 for the Mac which is not being released until 2008).

All these free offers are examples of open source software, normally developed by volunteers around the world on a collaborative and altruistic basis, and often with the specific objective of challenging the domination of the software industry by large companies and in particular of course, Mr Gates’ empire. Mozilla outline their reasons for wanting to challenge the domination of Microsoft, and it is quite clear that openoffice.org too is deliberately intended to reduce Microsoft’s enormously dominant market share. Open source development work is not always entirely altruistic - the arguments are quite well set out here - as well as more examples of it.

Of course there are still plenty of things relating to the internet to pay for. Most people do still pay for basic access to the internet, to a commercial internet service providers (ISPs) - though personally I took up an offer last year from my mobile phone provider which entailed them me giving them £5 a month less than I was doing before, and in return them giving me a lot more free mobile phone calls, and free broadband internet access (as well as free off-peak ordinary landline phone calls). And if you’re prepared to go down to your local public library for your internet access, you can probably get it for free there.

But it is remarkable how much is available free. I can see these falling into two main categories.

The first seems benign and positive, almost reassuring in a cynical age. Many of the developers who have freely given their time and expertise to developing these applications have, as with the original Linux scheme (an alternative PC operating system to Windows), done so out of a genuine desire to oppose a domineering monopolist and to maintain diversity and freedom of ideas. And there is some very good thinking behind that - once ideas or development of a particular technology becomes the exclusive property of one person or organisation, we should all be worried - and not just because it means we may not make the most of any new opportunities to develop it further, but because it constitutes a concentration of power in a very raw sense.

The second group of reasons is more worrying. The reason that much of this stuff is provided free is because the providers know that they can make their money instead from advertising. Now, there’s nothing wrong with providers of popular websites or other services taking advertising from others which allows them to continue to provide their service - I’m sure we can all think of plenty of examples where it allows people to provide popular and often useful and valuable services. And I’m certainly not against people being able to engage in normal commercial transactions of taking advertising.

But is there not something wrong when almost everything can be provided free because the provider is exploiting the relationship they have formed with us, the consumer of their service, their power over us, in order to make money from advertising? It does seem to be a final confirmation that we live in a market state - where almost anything can be provided free, as long as somebody is able at the same time to use the opportunity to try and sell you something else. If everything on the internet can be provided free, why not everything else - I suppose the only difference is that no-one yet seems to have found a way of providing us the water, gas, or electricity you can consume ready-integrated with a sales message.

I don’t want to sound like a luddite nor stop people engaging in normal commercial activity - and technological change always goes hand in hand with social change. But I am the only person who finds it all a bit odd?