I'm not convinced that "free at point of use" is a useful concept - it's more useful to figure out when and where costs are snuck in, and then decide if the price is worth it and if the right people are paying for it.

Go ahead and object that "nothing is really free", but "free at point of use", once we're being specific, is useful. It means, "This service is accessible without paying up-front, because the costs are being paid elsewhere." Of course there are still costs to be paid, but there are a couple of whole fields of study devoted to finding the most socially desirable ways of paying them.

So for instance, we have reason to believe that if, on top of the existing journal-subscription-and-paywall system, we added additional up-front fees for reading academic research papers, this would raise the costs of scientific research, in terms of dollars and labor-hours spent to obtain the outputs we care about.

Also, please, not every LW comment necessitates conceptual nitpicking. If I start with "academia publishes a lot of useful research which can be obtained and read for free by people who know how to do literature searches", please do not respond with, "Well what is free anyway? Shouldn't we digress into the entire field of welfare economics?"