The economy of the Internet is based on the access to information.
Unlike broadcasting mass-media, the internet is an interactive
communication medium. There's no need for audimeters, because the access
to information is made by individuals through computers with a two way
connection to the net. Each has an IP address which leaves a trace on
the servers. By monitoring and using such traces, companies have
perverted the spirit of interactivity and have created frontiers that
break the unity of the Internet. They have spoiled the possibility of a
culture of participation.

Every time a server gets a hit and every time a search engine gets a
query, the owners of the site learn about the needs, the desires and the
interests of potential customers. Tracking access to information is made
directly by server owners through their access statistics and indirectly
through the search statistics provided by information search engines and
directories. To some extent, the ownership of access information is more
valuable than information itself, given that for a server owner
information about access has a market price while information
(knowledge) supposes a cost. This explains the fact that a result screen
of a search engine or a highly visited site can be hired as space for
publicity, no mater the quality of its content. When access by itself
becomes an issue of commercial and statistic interest, the link between
access and information breaks down.

Information about access is the boundary between amateur and
professional content delivery and dissemination. An interface designer
or an interaction scriptwriter both get paid for increasing the amount
of access to certain information. On the contrary, web specific art
projects are usually trying to break the economy of the internet in a
metaphorical sense; either they create visions and slogans about free
information (which range from hacker anti-copyright activism to amateur
like content and fake corporation paraphernalia), or they build
tautological interfaces which are not an access to information, but only
interaction for interaction's sake (which go from the casual and playful
to the transcendental and meta-linguistic and auto-referential).
Although all these art works are highly valuable, they are poorly known
and thus incapable of achieving their intentions. They can be seen as an
expression of the urge for a real and effectively free public space.

Economic dictatorship of access monitoring is creating enormous
differences within the Internet, a medium that promised equal
opportunities of visibility to all. The dramatic transformation of this
medium in the last five years responds to the logic of market taking
over the logic of participation and knowledge.

FREEBIOTS is a web specific art proposal by Roc Pares, which uses
information and communication technologies to create automatic and
unpredictable hits and queries all over the Internet. The intention is
to dismantle the present economic logic of the Internet, in order to
take it forward to the state of freedom dreamed of by its utopian
founders and defenders.

FREEBIOTS are artificially intelligent agents, which will start moving
around the Internet on January 1st, 2000 at 00:00.00 GMT. Their mission
is to create confusion by invalidating all access and search statistics
on the Internet. Desired foreseeable consequences are the end of
advertising and investing by all corporations on the World Wide Web, the
loss of credibility of all market trends detected through Internet
tracking, the restitution of free public space and respect for
intellectual property rights as opposed to copy and access rights.