Jerry, as to the necessity of OTARD rules, you may be on to something, not just due to competition forces, but technology. In your movie theater example, one can smuggle in popcorn. In an airport, I can use my Treo and check e-mail, use the browser, etc. A subscriber to an EVDO-like service can go online in an airport as well. Neither use Wi-Fi. Denying Wi-Fi just shifts users to other technologies.

This is, of course, unlicensed spectrum we’re talking about here. Hard to talk about markets and property in this artificial commons where everyone is forced to share through non-interference rules. Now if the airport owned some spectrum and Continental tried to put up a competing service in that owned spectrum, I’d go to the mat for Massport.

To me the central point (victory) of this decision is “the commissioners also dismissed Massport’s argument that Continental’s service would cause it economic harm by taking away revenue from the airport’s own Wi-Fi offerings. (quote from the Cnet article). In brief, the attempt by Massport to extort “ownership” is a continuation of the attempt today of corporations to “create” property rights to guarantee a revenue stream for themselves. A free market system is based on competition, NOT the establishment economic territories that use figurative “tollbooths” to collect revenue simply because you are in that territory.