Back in the dotcom days, when dialup Internet connections were everywhere, free ISP offers were inescapable. The deal was that you viewed advertising while your computer was connected to the Internet, and in return you got your Internet connection for free.

The rise of more expensive and technically-complex broadband connections, however, has almost entirely killed this business model. Some free ISPs remain, but they are struggling. Only demographics that are undesirable to advertisers use dialup nowadays, making it almost impossible for them to sell their advertising inventory for as much as they would like.

However, this varies widely from country to country. In America, for example, free ISPs like Juno and NetZero are still holding on to a significant market share, thanks mainly to very large geographical distances between towns making broadband impractical in some places. AOL dialup, although not free and not even very good, is also surprisingly dominant in the American market.

Many European countries, on the other hand, are in the middle of broadband price wars, with some telecoms providers such as the UK's TalkTalk offering free broadband service as part of their telephone strategy. This broadband can often be of dubious quality and requires the customer to sign up for phone service with the provider, but on the other hand it doesn't feature any advertising or deliberate crippling of the services in the way that many dialup ISPs did.

However, in the future, we could be heading for a return to the free ISP, thanks to the rise of wireless networks. Sending wireless signals around is essentially free, apart form the initial cost of the equipment, and as wireless technology improves it will become cheaper and cheaper to cover whole towns and cities with access to wireless broadband. It is possible, in the future, that subscription-based ISPs could die entirely, to be replaced by local governments and authorities handling Internet access, in the same way as water or rubbish disposal.