My internet connected computers were owned by a business. They were desktops inside my company's building.

However I dug more and I found this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

> Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998

so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go through any authorization process.

I always used Navigator/Communicator for free personally but a lot of companies (especially big companies) bought licences. I'm sure many companies did not pay for a license but there was more than enough that did to make Netscape a viable and growing business.

There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled the role that Outlook fills now.

That's right, I won't link here but one of jwz's earliest blog posts describes putting Mozilla 0.9 on an FTP server in '94 and hundreds of thousands of people were downloading it. I assume this violated some commercial license and I know my employer (UC) did buy their server product but I don't recall anybody even remotely considering licensing Netscape Navigator itself.