Sir, - Brian Boyle (May 14th) and other, similarly-minded letter writers appear to be ignorant of the following facts:
1. The Internet is not a service, it is merely the information-bearing infrastructure on which electronic services such as ireland.com are published.
2. Private subscribers generally pay a flat monthly or annual fee to the service provider for unlimited time on line, so time spent logging on or surfing is not an issue, as Mr Boyle purports.
3. Like all businesses with sensible income-generating strategies, ireland.com is in the business to make money.
4. In turn, ireland.com must pay some of that income to the telecommunications company that provides it with sufficient bandwidth to host all its content.
5. There is a lot of free content on the Internet, most of it of questionable quality and trustworthiness, but the reality is that one must almost always subscribe for the best and most trusted sources of news, stock market analyses, information technology standards, etc.
To their demise, many dot.coms with great ideas failed to realise that the Internet is not an end in itself; there must be an accompanying income-generating strategy. Happily, it seem that ireland.com will not make that mistake. - Yours, etc.
NIALL O'DONOGHUE,
Narva,
Finland.