The last line from the article you quote is spot on.<p>Why are alleged &quot;services&quot; provided for &quot;free&quot;?<p>One group will tell you it&#x27;s because advertisers are picking up the costs for &quot;content&quot;.  Another group will tell you that it&#x27;s because no user (cf. advertiser) would pay if a &quot;fee&quot; were charged to use the www.<p>Of course, no &quot;free&quot; business model will dare test the theory of the later group, so I guess we&#x27;ll never know how the user values these &quot;services&quot;.  Instead the investors and advertisers set the value.  Grossly inflated.<p>In the early days of the internet as I remember it the real (non-hardware) costs for the internet were tolls on telephone calls (dial-up).  Organizations picked up the tab for employees who used the internetwork.  Tuition-paying students also got access.<p>Then came UUnet and &quot;ISP&#x27;s&quot;.  And then people had their own personal computer, at home, with a network card.<p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned, the internet connection fee is still the only real cost.<p>I think the browser you allude to is possible.  But I think some changes in thinking in how information is structured and presented on the www is needed.  If we let the www be shaped solely by web developers with a lust for layers of abstraction and increased complexity and being given carte blanche to run code on others&#x27; computers, then it forces the &quot;browser&quot; to be something that is far too complex and too much trouble for any open source volunteer programmer to deal with.<p>Make the www easier to parse and then the www &quot;browser&quot; becomes easier to replicate.  This is only my opinion.  Others would certainly disagree.