I don’t care what the argument is – commerce, education, pornography or poker – wireless internet access is simply not a public good. Although Wi-Fi has certain properties that tempt us into thinking of it as a public good (i.e., it can be non-rivalrous), it fails the litmus test because it’s cheap and easy to make a network private. Wi-Fi access is inexpensively and perfectly excludable; and sufficiently so for most residential consumers, from their router or modem. And no business that cares about its bottom line would dare use a public and unsecure network.
But try telling that to the bureaucrats in Royal Oak or Madison Heights, MI (with a half-dozen or more locales soon to follow suit.
It’s not free. And you’ll end up losing out on service, quality, control, and more than likely, your privacy.
Just remember, all your activity on the internet is known by your ISP. Would you rather your ISP be a private company, or the government? Why don’t you ask the Chinese how it’ s working out for them?
It also forces everyone to pay for it, even if they don’t want it. Then again, that’s par-for-the-course for most government programs.
Whatever…
“Would you rather your ISP be a private company, or the government? Why don’t you ask the Chinese how it’ s working out for them?”
Nice quote.
[...] our own, local initiative, to provide Wi-Fi free to everyone in Oakland County., an initiative that I opposed from day one. Why, for instance, is one of the wealthiest counties in the country providing “free” [...]