Felix Salmon links approvingly to my op-ed yesterday, but he takes exception to my claim that using your neighbor’s bandwidth as a permanent Internet connection is borderline theft of service:
Well, is it theft of service or isn’t it? And who’s being stolen from here, Lee or the ISP? Would Lee slap on that password because he feels a debt of gratitude to his ISP for its service, and hopes that maybe the price will come down if his “unscrupulous neighbor” pays a monthly charge as well?
The answer is that you’re stealing from the ISP. Think of an all-you-can-eat buffet: they charge you $7 for all the food you can eat because they make reasonable assumptions about how much the typical person eats. Some particularly large people eat mor than $7 worth of food, but the average customer eats less than $7 worth of food, and so the buffet is able to make money.
If you take your table scraps home to your dog, the buffet probably doesn’t care. The amount of food involved is trivial, and you wouldn’t have brought the dog in anyway. But if you shovel a bunch of food into a tupperware container to share with your friends, that’s not kosher because you’re breaking the terms of the “all you can eat” agreement.
By the same token, the broadband provider provides you with an “all you can download” service for you and the members of your household. The viability of this arrangement depends on people not “cheating” by sharing the service with neighboring households. Sharing your wireless connection is analogous to sneaking food out of the all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure you could have consumed all of that bandwidth yourself, but the fact is that you wouldn’t have. The flat-rate pricing model only works because most customers pay for their own connections.
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