Death of the 'Internet Commons'? I Don't Think So: "Many e-media companies will continue to have both free and premium services; fewer will be able to sustain the "walled garden" model of, say, the Wall Street Journal. Many if not most viable online publishing ventures in the future will maintain a mix of both free and paid content. But enough free content will remain to satisfy even the info ideologues.[...] But to those who still believe the Net should somehow be a gift from Heaven like sunshine or rain and that any attempt to charge for access to content is a sin, I say come back to Earth. 1994 was a looonnnggg time ago in Web years."

A great post (as in "one I totally agree with") by Rick Bruner, who shares with me the conviction that Big Corporations will have a hard time turning the Internet as their "walled gardens," and the existence of online services that are not free (as in beer) doesn't mean free content (as in speech) has to disappear. In other words, capitalism and personal freedom can successfully coexist, and the Internet is as good a "place" as any for that to happen. At yet a further level of meta thought, I would also argue that ambitious pragmatism stands proud between unrealistic idealism and selfish cynicism, but that's just me.