Tale of Content

Slate's Jack Shafer on the maybe-future-look of paid Intertubes content.

"If the commercial Internet didn't get going until 1995, then we're only 13 or 14 years into the Web era. When television was 13 or 14, practically no pay-TV operations existed outside of a relatively few cable television operations. Starting the 1970s and then in the 1980s, paid TV in the form of HBO and other premium stations started to take root. Radio, born in the early 1920s, didn't arrive in a paid form until just early in this century."