Free WiFi Trend Continues 296
Palal writes "San Francisco is about to embark on a Free (or low cost) WiFi campaign with the mayor holding the reins, of course, in hopes of offering more low-income residents easier access to the Internet. Since San Francisco, unlike Philadelphia (previously covered on Slashdot for a similar project), is only 49 square miles, will this work here and can this be accomplished in a year as promised or is this just another political plot to get the Mayor re-elected?"
Low income residents in San Francisco (Score:3, Insightful)
too bad (Score:2, Insightful)
How? (Score:3, Insightful)
Political plot? (Score:4, Insightful)
A failing of American Liberalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be cynical (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the engineers who get the credit for bringing forth new technologies, it's the managers who do. So too do the politicians get credit for the work of their underlings. The main point is that the benefits are realized, not that someone who had a leadership role gets all the credit.
So yeah, let's get San Francisco unwired up (is that the right way to say it?)! If it works there, at a reasonable cost, maybe we can get initiatives moving in other big cities. The internet is one of those utilities that ought to be available to anyone looking for it. Putting the government in charge of distribution may not be the best choice, but it is a quick fix until private enterprise can compete.
Re:Low income residents in San Francisco (Score:5, Insightful)
Free access (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A failing of American Liberalism (Score:2, Insightful)
Their kids will be able to do better in school (provided they don't always play games), and maybe the kids and the parents may be able to learn skills that would provide them a better standard of living. It could well be a good way out of "the hole" for them.
Three kinds of Free now. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, they are talking about pre-billed, manditory WiFi, in which residents of a city are forced by the state to fund a WiFi connection with their taxes, whether they have better alternatives available or not.
Now it seems we need three different definitions for "Free":
1. Free as in "speech"
2. Free as in "beer"
3. Free as in "pay for it or go to jail"
Re:low-income residents easier access to the Inter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:free good (Score:2, Insightful)
D'oh! *smacks self on forehead* :-)
Re:A failing of American Liberalism (Score:2, Insightful)
The poor rarely benefit from government programs. More often than not the programs simply make life slightly more bearable instead of actually improving their lives.
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Electricity is free
2. Network bandwidth is free
3. Network maintainance is free
4. Network adminidstrators can live off air
So yah, shove your idealistic freedom and face the reality. Plus, TFA never mentioned anything like $5 fee. All I read was that the city hasn't made any financial commitment yet to the $18-20 million cost.
Politeracy (Score:3, Insightful)
No, reelections are legitimately based only on glowing recommendations from paid actors, speeches from pulpits subsidized with "faith-based initiaves", and strutting flight suits. That's our democracy: demediocracy.
politics? hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
geeks are a underwhelming minority of any general population, particularly among the uneducated (and one assumes that the uneducated largely have lower incomes than those who are educated and therefore concludes that low-income residents of a city would have an even smaller proportion of geeks than the city at large).
Far, far more people are interested in how much in taxes they pay each year. Offering free wifi would certainly have an impact on those figures.
How, then, does offering free wifi help him politically (other than for brownie points with an interest group here or there)?
I don't know who the mayor is or what his ideological positions are, and I also don't care. I just thought I'd point out that
Re:free good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gotta Love Canada (Score:3, Insightful)
Representative Democracy != Plot (Score:3, Insightful)
That's DEMOCRACY.
Now, as to whether the electorate really ought to resort to taxation to provide broadband access to the masses -- that's a policy matter I leave to the people of the Great State of California.
Re:A failing of American Liberalism (Score:2, Insightful)
Although, like everything else, this WiFi move is political, it also makes sense for San Fran. I think San Francisco sees internet connection as becoming another basic utility. San Francisco can provide this utility to their population for cheap, so why not?
San Francisco and Silicon Valley do place a heavy emphasis on being tech savy. There is a big divide here between those who have basic tech ability, and those who dont. Gavin (the mayor) is betting that WiFi for all will help those on the wrong side of the divide catch up.
Another, (and in my view, more problematic) political undercurrent in SF is that our fair city's government wants to take everything they can under local government control. The city is trying to take back the electric and gas utilities from private hands, and they put additional regulations on business who work in the city(i.e. companies must avoid "sweatshop labor" for any products they purchase overseas if they want a city contract,there is higher minimum wage for those who work in SF than the rest of the state) even though the state of California is already on of the most regulated states in the union. If the city government can grow by adding a "San Francisco Department of WiFi," it will make them happy. In fact, it will make everyone in the city happy. There is no anti-big government in San Francisco politics. It's big government (Democrats) vs. even bigger government (Green Party). Republicans aren't even on the SF political map.
In light of the politics in San Francisco, there is no downside for the mayor to do this.
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:5, Insightful)
[sarcasm]
I know exactly what you mean. I hate all that mandatory, pre-billed bullshit the government forces me to buy. Roads, schools, scientific exploration, law and order... I wish we could just get a menu and order only the things that we personally are going to use...
[/sarcasm]
seriously though, if you've ever attended a public school, used a public library, driven on a public road, or used the fruits of Government Scientific research (velcro, the internet... etc), you might just want to reconsider your previous knee-jerk belly-aching about public funds being used to supply a public good. If the nature of what the government provided for the public good never adopted new technologies, we'd still be waiting on the pony express to deliver our mail.
And yes, you have to pay for government, or go to jail. its called citizenship.
"We're free to choose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we dont want to pay our taxes, Why... We're free to spend a weekend with the pain monster!"
The way I see it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you (via your elected representatives... not to mention "voting with your feet") feel that tax-funded Wi-Fi is worth it, then good luck with that. Just don't lie by calling it free, is all. That's all I was saying.
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:3, Insightful)
In that case you're paying for the wifi in increased coffee prices.
Cute that you put "..." in place of "private homes", and cut off the part about encryption removal.
Park in front of a Dunn Bros. Coffee shop, or for that matter, in my driveway, and you are on the Internet for free. Free as in beer.
Forced is a bit strong; the residents of the city voted for the mayor.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner. If the 51% residents of your town decided that you, personally, should pay half your income in taxes in order to fund a small property-tax cut for everybody else, would "forced" still be too strong of a word?
If majority-rules was a fair way to decide everything, we could reduce the entire Constitution and all of the amendments to a single line: "Whatever the people vote for, that's what we do."
Yeah, like those damn FreeWAYS (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, they are talking about pre-billed, manditory WiFi, in which residents of a city are forced by the state to fund a WiFi connection with their taxes, whether they have better alternatives available or not.
Network infrastructure (as opposed to services like webhosting, etc.) is extremely analogous to the highway system, including the lack of economic growth and monopolism that arises when said infrastructure is privately owned (think of the last mile of copper, and the 98% unused fiber that results from the baby bell's local monopolies, for example). Much of the FCC's efforts are a (failing) effort to mitigate this fundamental problem through regulation. Competative markets only exist, and work, when the underlying infrastructure is publicly owned. If we had privately owned highways, no little startup would even be able to drive to work, much less ship a product (or even receive parts to build their product) using their competitor's highway system.
San Francisco is doing exactly the right thing. There is a place for free market capitalism, and there is a place for public works. The Highway System, and Communications Infrastructure, are two examples of the latter.
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a difference between saying "schools should be funded through the government" and "schools should exist and teach people things, even people who can't afford it".
You are setting up a false dichotomy where supposedly the only way we could have the "public good" you mention is through government forcing people to pay for it in taxes, wasting 50% of the money and then providing the services, usually poorly and to most people's dissatisfaction. The only alternative you apparently can imagine is that no one has those things.
Imagine if the government turned grocery stores into a "public good" so as to provide everyone with their basic food needs. That's at least as reasonable and necessary (if not more so) than your other examples of government providing a "public good".
Based on current examples of similar government programs, what we'd end up with is overpaying for lousy food in a poor selection, with some people who still buy their food elsewhere at an extreme premium in addition to funding their "free" food.
And people with your mentality would be talking about how everyone in the country would starve if the government hadn't stepped in to provide free food and what are people complaining about...
See, it's not that we disagree about the goals. We all want a good road/network/whatever infrastructure, a good educational system, etc... it's just that we don't all agree that the only choices are central planners forcing people to do it their way or nothing at all.
Think of the worst run things in our country that people complain about the most how they are handled and that they are problems that need to be solved still. Something you'll find in common is that they are almost all government run or highly-regulated government-granted monopolies.
It's the empirical evidence that makes the rest of us question why people keep wanting to do things the same way, just becuase some power-hungry politician wants to be in control of it so that he can claim to be providing it for "free" as a benefit to the people.
Re:Yeah, like those damn FreeWAYS (Score:3, Insightful)
Competative markets only exist, and work, when the underlying infrastructure is publicly owned. If we had privately owned highways, no little startup would even be able to drive to work, much less ship a product (or even receive parts to build their product) using their competitor's highway system.
good point. The Internet's growth has been disappointing. When the gub'mint assumes control of the private internet infrastructure, then we'll see some amazing advances in network technology and capacity. And don't forget the increased freedom from surveillance we will receive!
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:2, Insightful)
So, in your world, the US government should be providing free WiFi to the citizens of Brazil and the Brazilian government should be providing free WiFi to the citizens of US? And anything else is unethical?
However, if you take some of my money and then use it to offer me something "for free", that is not the same thing.
It's free in the sense that you'll be paying less than you would be for a private service because of economies of scale. It's also free in the sense that it will be encouraging economic development and thus reducing the tax load on you in the long term.
Re:A failing of American Liberalism (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm assuming a city as progressive as SF already has a few food shelters, halfway homes, salvation armies, and other service organizations that do food/clothes drives and distribute these necessities to the poor. And by low-income residents I don't think the article is talking about bums on the street, but rather low-income families that can make ends meet, but to whom broadband (or any kind of) internet access is a luxury they can't afford.
Having free WiFi access just might motivate more people to buy a cheap home computer with a WiFi card and take advantage of the technological resource. To me, this is important, as I'm a strong believer that education and knowledge empower people, and the internet has simply become an indespensible technology to the modern man by putting a previously unfathomable amount of information at your very fingertips.
Personally, I've taught myself most of what I know today through the information available on internet. This includes how to use Photoshop, HTML/DHTML, Javascript, PHP, Perl, MySQL, and other skills that I wouldn't have had it not been for the internet. And you know what? All this information was availabe to me for free--except for the cost of internet access. I've probably read much more information via electronic texts(Project Gutenberg), online articles(Znet, Indymedia, Slashdot, Devshed, Everything2, etc.), e-mail correspondences, forums, etc. than I have through printed materials. If this information had not been accessible to me for free, I probably would not have gotten back into reading for pleasure, I would not have the job skills that I survive on today, and I would not have discovered my passion for intellectual pursuit, art, and philosophy had it not been for the internet.
Sure, a lot of people probably get by just fine without internet access at home, but I think anything that facilitates the free flow of information and can give people easier access to information is a good thing.
Re:Three kinds of Free now. (Score:2, Insightful)
Likewise, everytime somebody calls something "free" when it is funded with taxes, people will post a correction, stating that it's not really free, but rather is a hidden cost.
Instead of getting pissed off at the nit-picks, people should endeavor to get it right the first time.
Far more tiresome than politically-motivated moderation is people who post instructions to "mod down" those points which they dislike. I see from your comment history that this is something you do a lot.
If my comments pain you so greatly, instead of spending your energy trying to convince others to help you censor views you don't like, just put me and anybody else who expresses an opinion you can't handle on your "foes" list and set us at -6 in your preferences.