Because the services cost money to run and are free to use.

For most websites advertising is not just another revenue stream, it's their ONLY revenue stream. Servers and bandwidth cost money, and if you're doing something right, lots of money. If you're doing something right with video it's a heinous amount of money. Having a successful website doesn't qualify you for instant magic payments, you have to go earn the money somehow.

It's amazing that so many bright people who work with technology just don't get this concept (perhaps they live mainly in academia, where you do get magic payments)

The subscription revenue model died out five years ago. It didn't work. It turns out most people prefer to have their content for free and see a few ads rather than pay $30 a year for no ads. I have seen sites that went the wrong direction (ad funded to subscription only) and they either very quickly reverted or died. Traffic dropped by 90-99%, revenue by 50-75%. They can make it in some very specialised sectors (eg finance, nautical weather) but by and large it's a dud model.

Erm... you have worked in a real business haven't you? After creating "Out of Order" and christmas party notices in Word Art, mail-merge is probably the single most used function that word has.

buh? Based on what? And why Europe specifically? The OECD country that gets shit most at WTO meetings is the US, for constantly putting protectionist tariffs on imports. cf steel, cotton, sugar, ethanol, etc, etc

The UK already has biometric passports, though the fingerprint and iris scan info is voluntary (currently).

http://www.ips.gov.uk/passport/about-biometric-why.asp

I wish ID cards were a political suicide pill. I really don't understand why both main parties are pushing ahead with them come what may. It's ridiculously expensive, impossible to enforce and hugely unpopular, so whats in it for them??

Capitalist economics doesn't work like that. Money that consumers don't spend doesn't contribute to GDP, but money they do spend does, and GDP is the magic number (remember, we're all happier when the numbers go up).

This highlights why OSS won't be a pillar of Obama's spending spree. Microsoft sell software made by developers they pay and these developers then spend their pay on other software (say). This moves money round the economy continuously and makes the GDP look great. Paying a developer to create a free piece of software is effectively a one off payment and doesn't contribute to GDP much (it mainly increases coffee consumption), in fact all it does really is inflate government spending/borrowing.

The end result for the user is clearly better in the second case, but better for the "economy" in the first. If you want the government to choose what's better for the user at the expense of the "economy", well, I guess you'd better move to Canada or one of those other commie countries cos it won't happen in the US of A.