As cities across the nation experiment with offering free or subsidized Wi-Fi access to their citizens, stories are cropping up regarding stumbles along the way in these endeavors. It’s a grand thought gaining traction in diverse regions of the country: Give your residents and businesses high-speed wireless Internet access for free or really cheap and they’ll love you. In San Francisco, citizens may soon have the choice to get free but advertising-laden Wi-Fi access, or pay for the service and get access without those pesky pop-up ads.
Most people concede the model is not perfect. It’s not necessarily fair that low-income residents get one kind of service and the wealthy receive another. But since when is that the case in anything in America, whether in health care or buying a seat at the local baseball stadium? Often the phrase “you get what you pay for” resounds as people debate this new concept of cities offering broadband service.
On the other end of the spectrum, the net neutrality debate is taking place. Proponents of Internet neutrality believe it would be unfair and unwise to allow the companies carrying Internet traffic to offer different Internet experiences based on a variety of things, including price. For example, net neutrality proponents worry that AT&T Inc. could block or otherwise thwart Vonage Holdings Inc. from offering service because Vonage’s VoIP service competes with AT&T for telecom customers. Traffic providers counter that these concerns are overblown.
In the net neutrality debate, the phrase “you get what you pay for” is considered sacrilege. All transport companies-whether they are wireless or wireline, DSL or cable-should treat all content providers equally. A bank should not get a faster lane on the information superhighway, regardless of whether they are willing to pay for it, net neutrality proponents argue.
Contrasting the two movements, I find this: High-speed wireless broadband access, free or subsidized, is considered a luxury and so public officials are willing to live with flaws in the model as the effort takes shape. But if the net neutrality provision becomes law, it signals that at least at the transport layer, equal access to the Internet is essential. That it is more like a telecom service than an information service. And yet a light regulatory touch has always worked best with the Internet.
