Free ISPs Proliferate

L O S  A N G E L E S, June 1 -- Maybe your allegiance to The Simpsons borders onthe fanatical. Or you wouldn’t dream of bargain hunting anywhere but Kmart.Or you’d rather give up fast food than your subscription to Seventeenmagazine.

Whatever your interest, all three have something in common: in the pastyear, they’ve started offering free access to the Internet.

Yes, it’s true. Faithful fans of Bart, Homer and the whole dysfunctionalclan can sign up at Simpsons.com for a free dial-upInternet account.

Ditto Seventeen, Kmart, as well as companies as divergentas the daily newspaper RockyMountain News, golf site ChipShot.com and Gay.com.

Many of the major Web portals have also begun offering free access,including Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and AltaVista, through its Micro AV division.

More Free Access to Come

Remember when Hotmail kicked off the free e-mail craze? The number ofcompanies hoping to grab new viewers or customers by giving them free access is growing weekly and shows no signsof slowing.

The business smarts of offering free Internet access are uncertain. Publiclytraded free Internet access providers such as NetZero are losing money, andmany analysts still wonder whether free access will fly.

But it doesn’t appear to be stopping companies from giving it a try. Infact, the rush to offer free access is good news for Internet users, who canexpect an expanding array of extras such as free online storage,calendars and all-in-one message boxes when they sign up for free accounts.

New York-based market research firm Jupiter Communications projects that 6.2 percent of all Internet users will log on through a free connection thisyear, doubling to 13 percent by 2003.

Jupiter also estimates that private-label free Internet access of the kindoffered by the Simpsons.com and Kmart will account for 70 percent of allfree dial-up accounts by the end of the year, more than double what it waslast year.

“Why would a consumer want Wal-Mart for an ISP? At the first level, it’s acompany you know and trust,” said Dylan Brooks, a Jupiter analyst.“Secondly, because presumably these companies will be giving you some kindof incentive to use it, like ‘Connect through our ISP and at our Web site [to]get an extra 10 percent off of anything you buy.’”