Wi-Fi Socialism

Today’s on-line Wall Street Journal poll asks, “Should cities offer wireless Internet access to their residents, or leave it to companies?” The question keys off an article [link for on-line subscribers only] that illustrates how far the mentalité of the Journal’s news pages is from its editorial stance. Under the headline “Telecom Giants Oppose Cities on Web Access”, we read:

Dozens of cities and towns across the country are rushing to provide low- or no-cost wireless Internet access to their residents, but the large phone and cable companies, fearful of losing a lucrative market, are fighting back by pushing states to pass legislation that could make it illegal for municipalities to offer the service.

Over the past few months, several big cities – including Philadelphia and San Francisco – have announced plans to cover every square block with wireless Internet access via the popular technology known as Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity. Cities say these plans will spur economic development and help bridge the digital divide, making Web access nearly ubiquitous.

But that's bad news for the large Bell telephone companies and cable operators, who are looking to their digital-subscriber-line (DSL) and cable-modem businesses for growth. . . .

Philadelphia announced during the summer that it would hook up the entire city with Wi-Fi. Its current Wi-Fi service is free, but it hasn’t decided whether that would continue with wider deployment; it may charge a small fee. “There are some very specific goals that the city has that are not met by the private sector: affordable, universal access and the digital divide,” says Dianah Neff, the city’s chief information officer. She says that less than 60% of the city's neighborhoods have broadband access.

However, last week, after intensive lobbying by Verizon Communications Inc., the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a bill with a deeply buried provision that would make it illegal for any “political subdivision” to provide to the public “for any compensation any telecommunications services, including advanced and broadband services within the service territory of a local exchange telecommunications company operating under a network-modernization plan.” Verizon is the local exchange telecommunications company for most of Pennsylvania, and it is planning to modernize the region using high-speed fiber-optic cable. The bill has 10 days for the governor to sign it or veto it.

The Pennsylvania bill follows similar legislative efforts earlier this year by telephone companies in Utah, Louisiana and Florida to prevent municipalities from offering telecommunications services, which could include fiber and Wi-Fi.

Critics denounce this legislative tactic, arguing that the U.S. lags behind other countries in broadband Internet access because the phone and cable companies have been slow to roll out the service in some areas.

“We should be encouraging our municipalities to take a major role in broadband, the way other countries are doing,” says James Baller, an attorney in Washington, D.C., who represents local governments on telecommunications issues.

The article continues in this vein, freely quoting supporters of municipal wi-fi and never suggesting any reason, other than a desire to protect corporate profits, why anyone could oppose so clearly benign a measure. So far as my own self-interest is concerned, I ought to applaud Mr. Baller. If Chicago had free or cheap wireless access everywhere, I could save the $40 a month that I pay Earthlink. What that means, though, is that the city’s taxpayers, almost all of whom have lower incomes than mine, would be subsidizing my Web browsing. The majority of Chicagoans don’t even own computers and have little practical use for the Internet. At this point in time, wi-fi is a luxury good, and paying for it with tax dollars is a bald exercise in redistribution from the poor to the rich.

The day may come when the World Wide Web really is part and parcel of every American’s daily life, like the automobile and the telephone. If so, it will be only after a vast amount of progress beyond the current Stanley Steamer level of broadband technology, progress that won’t occur if wi-fi socialism acts as a prophylactic against profit. If cities had preempted telephone service c. 1900, we would still be dialing numbers on rotary phones, talking to operators and paying a day’s wages to call the next state. I won’t speculate on what city-subsidized cars would be like. If the “digital divide” is truly a great social ill, freezing the status quo is the prescription for making it eternal.

Liberals’ enthusiasm for tax-funded Internet access is just another symptom of the Left’s penchant for good intentions over good sense – and also of its indulgence in fashionable superstitions. Whether or not Al Gore invented it, the Internet is a communications medium, not a panacea for the ills of mankind. Philadelphia will be better off if it spends that $10 million slated for its wi-fi project on police, firemen and garbage collectors while Verizon takes care of getting on-line.

Comments

[Brian Reardon]

I found your blog after a search I performed to see the status of the newly introduced bill by state Sen. Rauschenberg in Illinois that addresses the issues you raise here.

I am a Republican and probably closer to a libertarian than a party-line Republican. This issue, as your own commentary illustrates, is GROSSLY misunderstood. This issue will provide the clearest illustration we will probably get of how big business has various state parties and officials, including Sen. Rauschenberg, in their firm grasp and control. Who are we most concerned with - who needs the greatest voice and representation?

I agree with you, as an Earthlink broadband user, I do not think (nor want) the city or any other state entity subsidizing MY internet access. As a blogger though, you should have a fondness for technology and its accessibility that your article does not demonstrate. You need to see and understand this issue differently.

The first clause of your second to last paragraph is astonishing: "[t]he day may come when the World Wide Web really is part and parcel of every American’s daily life..." We approach this line at an exponential speed! The day "may" come? As this day does come, we risk leaving an entire part of society behind. The main objective is not to get municipalities into some service in which they lack expertise. The objective is to provide an entire rung of society with access to a piece of technology that will help to narrow or at least not broaden the divide that already exists between the "haves and the have nots."

If legislation were so crafted to mandate certain cells be set-up by private companies in very specific geographic regions at a "subsidized" or perhaps more accurately, below market rate, then the same objectives could be accomplished. I am not bent on any specific means; I am concerned that big business has politicians in their pocket and such will result in choices made solely for the interest of big business clearly at the expense of those in our society who cannot afford to fall further behind in "basic" skills.

With kind regards,
Brian Reardon

Me: I think that the paragraph to which you object speaks for itself. Let me just add that very few people without Internet access own computers. Subsidizing wireless connections won’t do them any good at all.

[June Veal]

You made the Rocky Mountain News today with a short article on wi-fi. Mom