I assume they may be referring to freenets that was an early method of accessing the internet for free, not requiring AOL or some other service for access.
The usage of the term "free-net" to describe early methods of free internet access was quite obscure even in 1999, I only learned of it years after starting Freenet.
Similarly, no swiping took place more recently unless you think using the name of my own project is "swiping". I address this in more detail in a recent [1] reddit comment.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/1d05zw9/questions_...
Revenue about 2.5 billion Euro.
Calling this "swiping" implies I was aware of the previous meaning, I wasn't. Moreover, in 25 years this may be the first time someone has complained about it.
In any case, this is all ancient history at this point.
It was a much more trusting time in which people routinely gave all kinds of computer access to strangers just to help them out, or in some sense to help the net grow. When my computer club set up a Linux server at our high school, we sort of joined in by happily giving shell accounts to random strangers who had no connection with the school at all. Nobody seemed to think this was a bad idea!