> (-: Just kidding. Honest! I've been happily living in Canada all this time, and it never occured to me that anyone would be offering free ISP service. And if they were, it probably would be feasible only to inhabitants of Toronto or Vancouver or some other Canadian metropolis with local dial-up access. Free email services, sure: there's lots of that. Free ISP? I'd be curious to learn about free Canadian providers, too. How would they make enough profit to continually upgrade and maintain their services without incurring unacceptable delays for users?


From what I understand about free ISPs (and these are American ones), it's all about clicking on banners. The best example I can think of has a little "health meter" deal that sits on your desktop and slowly goes down over time. If it runs out, you're disconnected. You can give it a boost by clicking on one of the ISP's ads, which I guess are in the same window as the meter. I'm not sure about the specifics of it, like if you can just instantly reconnect or not if the meter runs out, or how fast the meter goes, but you can get the general idea.