Sweet, Sweet WiFi

by on March 9, 2008 · 4 comments

I’m stuck in the Charlotte airport, and I wanted to give some kudos to the good people of Charlotte for making WiFi access available in their airport for free. In this case, I’m stranded in Charlotte for a couple of hours, so I probably would have plunked down the requisite $7.99 if they’d asked for it. But in the vast majority of cases, where I’m in the airport for an hour or less before my flight, the fee discourages me from using the connection. This is a pure deadweight loss for the world, denying Internet access to a lot of people in order to squeeze a few dollars out of the handful willing to pay an inflated price for access. It’s good to see Charlotte buck the trend, and I hope my own airport follows Charlotte’s lead.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    Tim:

    But, you actually like free WiFi? Didn’t you get the memo that everyone else got at TLF that free WiFi is evil and wrong?

    I liked it quite a bit, and it’s interesting that the early adopting communities, like Beverly Hills and Flint Michigan were so completely different.

    E_F

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    Tim:

    But, you actually like free WiFi? Didn’t you get the memo that everyone else got at TLF that free WiFi is evil and wrong?

    I liked it quite a bit, and it’s interesting that the early adopting communities, like Beverly Hills and Flint Michigan were so completely different.

    E_F

  • Ryan Radia

    I’m not sure about Charlotte, but many airports with free Wi-Fi fund the service via advertisements. Denver switched from paid wi-fi to free, ad-supported wi-fi in late 2007. Since then, the numbers of users has skyrocketed and the program has been a success story.

    However, it was recently revealed that Denver’s wi-fi is censored. Apparently, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition is too racy for airport-goers, even though newstands at DIA freely display the magazine. Even boingboing.net is supposedly banned in Denver. This is a commercially-owned network, so consumers have no expectation of open access. Still, I prefer being able to access the whole internet, not just the parts of it deemed appropriate by corporate overlords.

  • Ryan Radia

    I’m not sure about Charlotte, but many airports with free Wi-Fi fund the service via advertisements. Denver switched from paid wi-fi to free, ad-supported wi-fi in late 2007. Since then, the numbers of users has skyrocketed and the program has been a success story.

    However, it was recently revealed that Denver’s wi-fi is censored.

    Apparently, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition is too racy for airport-goers, even though newstands at DIA freely display the magazine. Even boingboing.net is supposedly banned in Denver. This is a commercially-owned network, so consumers have no expectation of open access. Still, I prefer being able to access the whole internet, not just the parts of it deemed appropriate by corporate overlords.

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