Hotmail to charge for e-mail service: "Almost half of the European users questioned in the report said they would never consider paying for net services. A website called The End of Free is documenting the creeping commercialisation of websites and web-based services."

Thanks to the BBC for pointing to us, and welcome to you new readers! I have a couple comments to add:

I'm curious to know whether the people who answered they'd "never consider paying for net services" have an Internet connection at home. If they do, they're inconsistent with themselves since they already pay their ISP (I don't think there's anyone left to offer 100% free 'net access). If they don't, well, we already knew so far they hadn't considered it worthy to pay for net services, so there's nothing really new here. In some countries at-home penetration is only at 30% of households or lower. Obviously some people are left out due to low income, however many others could afford it but don't see the value.

I'm not sure "creeping commercialisation" is a fair way to portray what Hotmail or Yahoo Mail do, since these have always been commercial services. I'm even surprised they ever let people use their services through POP3 for free, since they hardly could monetize that usage through advertising (POP3 users don't even need to go to the web site, they get their mail with a desktop app such as Eudora or Outlook.) I don't see how a free ad-supported online service would be less "commercial" than its fee-based counterparts.

Update: a reader tells me I'm mistaken about Hotmail's POP3 retrieval. In fact this service is about retrieving e-mail from other POP3 accounts into Hotmail, so it does work in the browser (but it's probably more resource-intensive to do than just checking your Hotmail inbox). My comment was relevant as far as Yahoo's paying POP3 access (to a Yahoo account from a desktop app) is concerned.