Free

For all practical purposes, electronic storage is "free''. We see its implications everywhere (see review of Chris Anderson's book). An extension of it is, let us say, electronic publication of conf or journal proceedings is "free''. Then, how will our world be different? Do we really need page limits on paper submissions, and force authors to do baselinestretch, use times font, and other torts?

ps: Of course people will argue it is not really free, or that ultimately, the measure to optimize is readers' attention, so we need confs to select and rank papers, and authors to write papers in a prefix-complete sense (readers read from the beginning and stop when they want to, and the results should make sense no matter where they stop), etc.