McCarthy’s grand vision for domestic computing was notable for being anti-commercial. He predicted that greater access to information would promote intellectual competition, while “advertising, in the sense of something that can force itself on the attention of a reader, will disappear because it will be too easy to read via a program that screens out undesirable material.” With such low entry costs for publishing, “Even a high school student could compete with the New Yorker if he could write well enough and if word of mouth and mention by reviewers brought him to public attention.” The only threat McCarthy could see to the beautiful system he was conjuring were monopolists, who would try to control access to the network, the material available, and the programs that ran there. McCarthy suspected that the ability of any individual programmer to create a new service would be a check on the concentration of digital power, but he agreed, “One can worry that the system might develop commercially in some way that would prevent that.” As, indeed, it has.