Wouldnt ISPs give you a bit of web space with your internet plan back in the day? (I'm too young to have been around for that but I've heard it used to be a thing)

Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP. Also expectations on websites were different. They were allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things.

Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.

Ah, fair enough

Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)

I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!

Did you need an account to read the Yellow Pages?

No, you received piles of them on your doorstep whether you liked it or not.

Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?

Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree.

Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.

Just like the government finances roads, etc.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet access come before that?

Internet access doesn't seem to be an issue.

Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.

We should be making sure everyone has internet access, but hosting some basic pages is about 1000x cheaper, so no I don't think free internet access should come before that.

> Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?

Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.

Alright cool.

Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.

Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.

Forgive me for assuming that the government owned service would be more transparent/serve the people better than a privately owned, closed source, platform that's explicitly funded by ads and so is transparently corrupt. Even your worst case scenario for this would be equivalent to what we already have.

> Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.

Oh my! Mic drop! You got me! Corporate owned sites would have to be unbiased, right? It's not like a business would ever do something as disreputable favoring a restaurant that paid for the favored treatment, or try to steer you to affiliated businesses. Inconceivable!

But seriously now: a government-run site would be way better and have less biases. In the US, there's a good chance it'd be run by civically-minded people, and there's about zero chance that conflict of interest would be baked into its "business" model.

Trump would be running that right now if it existed.

Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the bailouts, the...

>the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me

Such a weird comparison. Just so we are tuned in, can you list some things that are of less value to you than a single bomb on a stranger?

My point is I don't want bombs dropped on strangers, so, in terms of things the government spends money on, there's nothing of less value to me that a single bomb on a stranger. Of all things the government spends its money on, I'd rather any one of those things to take 100% of the budget, than even a penny to go to dropping a bomb on a stranger, even if that significantly decreases my quality of life.

I just really don't like my government killing people far away that pose no threat to me.

Reading back through my comments, I recognize that omitting the quotes around “free services” would have made my comment here more palatable, and less provocative. That was poor form on my part.