But life is not so simple. I had responsibilities to all the people I’d sold on our Internet dream. I told them I’d find places for everyone in the phone company and that they’d be able to fulfill new dreams there. You can’t tell people what to dream, though. These people were Internet dreamers, and that’s all they wanted to do. “If people want local access, let’s sell them that,” they demanded.

“But the IIA doesn’t sell anything. We give things away,” I reminded them.

“Then to hell with the IIA Let’s have IDT sell the local access that our users are demanding,” they said.

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Are you nuts?” I said. “After everything we went through to build the IIA, and now you want to throw it away and start a commercial service?”

Their answer came back, “Why not?” The only “why not” I could think of is what if people wouldn’t buy.

A month after COMNET we informed all the New Jersey users that in thirty days the IIA was turning off its service unless the users were willing to pay something for it. Eventually Max and his users agreed that $15 per month for unlimited local access would be so low a price that most people would be able to live with it, but it was still enough for us to make a profit, if we did a high volume.

“Very high volume,” I protested, but my protests fell on deaf ears. Sometimes when people join you with dreams of their own, you have to run quickly to make sure you’re in front leading them to where they’re already going anyway. “Okay, there’s nobody better at creating tremendous volume than we are, so let’s get started.”

The day we offered $15 unlimited Internet access to all of our New Jersey users in place of their formerly free access, to our surprise and delight, more than 60 percent of the users took us up on the offer. That still wasn’t many people, but it was a start. We were in the Internet business . . . again.

The truth was, though, that we were now more than a year behind our competitors, a whole year since I’d cooked up my IIA free Internet brainstorm, and I had no one to blame but myself.

I had lost sight of the first cardinal principle of business: A business exists to make money. Once a business is making money, it can do many fine and noble things. It can give people jobs, explore new technologies, and undertake altruistic endeavors. But the important thing to remember is that these things are only side benefits of running a business that is oriented toward profit. Any other type of business can’t do these things, because in a competitive environment, no other kind of business can succeed.