Information Society Watch

September 27, 2007, Tim Wu, Slate.com

In recent years, many US cities have promised the installation of free municipal wireless Internet access, but these projects have fallen flat and cities such as Chicago, Houston, and even San Francisco are now abandoning their plans. This article suggests that the collapse of these projects is due to the inability of city governance to recognise the limitations of market solutions and to conceive of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that must be paid for. Instead, municipal governments have entered into public/private partnerships with private parties that are under-qualified and unable to compete with dial-up and broadband competitors with better infrastructure who have already paid off their capital investments. The author contrasts these policy failures with the success of the US town of St. Cloud, Florida (population: 28000), which treats free wireless as a public service and thus claims a 77% use rate among its citizens. The article argues that policy must learn from towns such as St. Cloud, and act upon the knowledge that good public infrastructure demands real public investment. Free wireless Internet offers many advantages on both a local and global level, but in order for these potentials to be realised, policy must first understand the nature of free wireless Internet as a public service and ensure that enough public funding is made available to development and maintain a strong public infrastructure.

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