It’s been two long years since the New York Times walled off large parts of their website to the outside world. Their “Times Select” service aimed to charge a monthly fee to read opinion pieces by the likes of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and so forth. The Times figured that their writers were so good, so much better than all the other bloggers out there, that people would gladly pay a premium fee for those opinions.

Of course, it turned out that people can get just as well-written pieces of opinion journalism elsewhere on the Internet, for free. The Times’ op-ed writers were effectively removed from the annals of online discourse, with only 250,000 subscribers to keep them company.

That all changed today! The New York Times, seeing that they could actually make more money from advertising by putting their content out there for free, opened up their opinion sections and even large portions of their archives. It turns out that Google and Yahoo-driven search traffic actually brings more people to their site than visitors to their direct pages, which tells you something about the future of content delivery.

So to celebrate the big day, here’s a link to an old NY Times story from 1995 when a little company called Netscape wanted to start charging 40 bucks for its browser (in retrospect not the best idea).

Welcome back to the Internet, Times.