Second site: the Internet is now virtually free

IF ONE event has shown that the Net has really changed, it was the success of Dixons' free Internet service, Freeserve. Within a few weeks 900,000 people signed up, about one in 50 of the adult population. Earlier this month, Tesco announced that holders of its loyalty card could also have Internet access for nothing (though, if my experience is anything to go by, they'll need to be determined - the system is struggling to cope with the demand). Immediately, Freeserve cut the price of its technical support phone lines to 50p a minute, halving the sole cost of its service. With high-street retailers fighting to give Internet services away, and the public signing up in droves, it looks as though the Net is now one of our mass media. Real people are getting on line.

I began to notice signs that this was imminent last summer. Previously unwired journalists took to e-mail like ducks to water, and at last it became the standard communication medium within the trade. For years, newspaper journalists have used electronic messaging systems to communicate across office networks. All it took was for these systems to be connected to the rest of the world. This process will unfold throughout information-based industries, large and small, where it hasn't already done so. E-mail is still a novelty in many quarters. And with each Microsoft release, office workers of the world are carried another step towards total messaging, global and local. The preview copies of the Office 2000 suite come with one clear message: the network is everything.

It was also last summer that Charles Jonscher realised how big the Net was going to be. In Wired Life (Bantam, pounds 14.99), he recalls overhearing two elderly couples exchanging e-mail addresses after a guided tour of a tourist spot, quite routinely and with no comments. They had reached the stage where asking whether somebody was on the Internet was as unnecessary as asking whether they were on the phone. One day, not too far hence, you will be those people.

In the meantime, we're faced with the question of how to make sense of it all. When I first started writing my digital culture column nearly three years ago, the prevailing prejudice was that the Internet contained nothing but trivia and nastiness. By the time we changed to a graphic format, I was confident that people accepted that the Net was interesting, but not so sure that they considered it to be useful. By now, the practical value of the Internet is beyond argument. The difficulty is not being able to see the Net for the dot coms. With the commercialisation of the Web, the Internet is moving to the centre of the economic stage. Understanding its implications is more important than ever.

The latest myth about the Net is that it is like the high street. The corner shops have been squeezed out by the big players, the disreputable elements have been shooed out of the pedestrian precincts, and the whole thing is set to become one vast, bland shopping mall. It will certainly look more and more like a mall, but the idea that commercialisation has the same effect on the Net as it does in the high street is based on a false analogy with the real world. The space along the pavement is fixed. If a superstore comes in, the corner shop has to go. But Internet space is indefinitely expandable. The personal home pages, the quirky film guides and the science fiction stories will not be crowded out by the giant players. They will, however, be easier to overlook.

Along with Web access and a mailbox, standard Internet service packages throw in megabytes of server space on which any subscriber can set up their World Wide Web stall. It is easier and cheaper than ever to create a website. Even if the free services don't last, they will set consumer expectations that will keep the cost of access to a minimum. But although the barriers to entry will continue to shrink, the difficult part is mustering the time, commitment and skills necessary to turn an idea into a site or a disc. If there's a worrying question for digital culture, it's whether people will continue to work for the Web's sake now that there's real money to be made.

Visit www.poptel.org.uk/secondsite for links to pages mentioned or contact Marek Kohn on secondsite@pop3.poptel.org.uk