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I've had the same Internet service provider for half a decade now. Each month, I pay its fee as reflexively as I write checks for electricity and heat. And I'm flushing money down the drain--at least according to a small army of PC World readers who have written lately to extol the virtues of their free ISPs.

These communiqués were prompted by our recent, decidedly lukewarm evaluation of free ISPs such as AltaVista, Freei.Net, and NetZero. We blundered, the letter writers contend, by reviewing the wrong freebie service providers. The contented customers of BlueLight.com, Freewwweb.com, and WorldSpy.net were particularly vocal.

So I gave those three free ISPs a whirl and found that the letter writers have a point. If all you need is an Internet connection and an e-mail address, a free ISP is worth a try. But I also discovered that the services don't come close to matching the features of a for-pay provider. In other words, my ISP (and possibly yours as well) earns its keep.

What Price Freedom?

No secret here: On the Web, free is a euphemism for marketing vehicle. In the case of BlueLight, the marketer in question is Kmart, which operates the service in partnership with Yahoo. When you sign up, you're forced to answer five screens of nosy questions about your income, education, and other personal matters. Then, whenever you're online (except at Yahoo), BlueLight confronts you with a small window of targeted advertisements.

True, one more billboard on the advertising-infested information highway is no big deal. But this window is particularly in-your-face: It floats on top of your browser, can't be shoved completely off-screen, and always seems to be in the way. So sorry, Kmart--you won't become my new ISP anytime soon.

Freewwweb and WorldSpy are more intriguing. Their sign-up forms demand only mundane facts like your current e-mail address, and neither defaces your desktop with an advertising window. The only unavoidable salesmanship happens when you log on to the Net: Each service automatically takes you to its own home page/shopping site. But once these force-fed home pages load, you can go where you will.

But do Freewwweb and WorldSpy monitor your wanderings around the Web, as some free ISPs do? Good question­-especially considering that posted privacy policies are vague at WorldSpy and nonexistent at Freewwweb. (And a name like WorldSpy doesn't exude a strong sense of anonymity.) So I asked, and both ISPs told me that they don't track the surfing habits of individual users.