On of my chapters begins with the story of Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who in 1954 famously said "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."

He was wrong. But what if he'd been right? How different would the world be? Today we have three technologies--processing power, digital storage capacity and bandwidth--that touch nearly as much of the economy as electricity, and they really are becoming too cheap to meter, and this chapter is about the implications of that.

In the course of writing this, I did a little research on the origins of the phrase, and like all famous quotes, it's wildly misunderstood. So here are five things you may not have known about "too cheap to meter", some taken from this great history page: