Liberal Talk Radio

Perhaps you’ve heard by now that the City of Philadelphia is working to bring free Wi-Fi to the entire city. Today I was reading Wired and saw another piece on Andrew Rasiej, who’s running for public advocate in NY on a platform of free Wi-Fi for everyone in New York City. Rasiej and the folks in Philly want to use it as a way to bring the Internet to the inner city and bridge the digital divide, which, in and of itself is not a bad idea. But the typical narrative here pits these city officials against the big, bad internet providers, like Verizon and Adelphia, who want to keep internet access private and profitable. I think both sides have a valid argument here, but I can’t help but wonder if the progressive goal of enabling inner-city internet won’t have some very anti-liberal side effects down the road. Could this mean trouble for free speech?

At the doctor’s office on Friday I re-read a 6-month-old copy of Time that I mentioned in passing when it first came out. The main article was about the new-old “indecency” debate (you know how it goes: “has Desperate Housewives GONE TOO FAR??). They said that Congress was looking at ways to regulate cable, but it’s difficult to do because, unlike the airwaves, cable lines are private property.

So, of course, this got me thinking: If you’re a free-speech advocate, like I am, maybe public Wi-Fi isn’t the best thing. After all, if they think cable’s indecent, wait’ll they get a load of the Internet. Should Wi-Fi become a public utility, it might be subject to the same sort of regulation. And that would, over the long run, be a bad thing. America would join a distinguished list of countries that block websites, right up there with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and China. No thanks.

I do believe, however, that there are certain uses for municipal Wi-Fi. For example, incentivizing public transit use. But let’s be careful before we go too far down this road.