Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

Well it must be close to Thanksgiving because the San Francisco politicians are out acting like a bunch of turkeys again, when it comes to bringing free wifi access to the city’s poor. Instead of of empowering those who can’t afford the internet, they’ve instead forced a showdown between Gavin Newsom’s plan to let Google and Earthlink give away free wifi to the citizens at no cost to the residents and the board of Supervisor’s plan to borrow money and build out their own network in a desperate attempt to squeeze money out of some of the city’s poorest residents.

Here’s a little hint, San Francisco politics + technology = guaranteed to screw it up.

Why the city leaders would delay implementation of free wifi when there is a bona fide offer on the table at no cost is beyond me. I wish I could say that I’m surpised by this latest piece of news, but after watching these turkeys in action last month, I find news of the stalemate anything but shocking.

During a time of the year known for peace between the founders of our country and the Native Americans, it’s sad to see the San Francisco board of Supervisors on the warpath over an issue that could be a social benefit to everyone. I did my part by trying to vote my turkey Supervisor out of office last November 7th, but unfortunately he squeeked by with a narrow victory in my district’s race.

I say that if San Francisco politicians don’t want free wifi then Google and Earthlink should just cut their losses and let them screw it up themselves. Sure it means higher taxes for me, higher broadband fees and a lame version of free wifi at the end of the day, but I’d understand after the abuse that they’ve taken over an inititive that really won’t even be all that profitable for them to begin with.

Given that the technology will likey be obsolete within five years anyway, the board of Supervisor’s plan to borrow money will ensure that residents are still paying interest on this long after the network has served it’s usefulness. The city of Alameda also provides a city owned broadband service and while it’s a breath of fresh air compared to the four year sweeheart monopoly that the board of Supervisors granted Comcast, it’s been anything but a success from an economic point of view.

Critics of the mayor’s plan, object to letting Earthlink use city lamposts for their wifi equipment because the company may actually turn a profit by providing a positive social benefit to the city. Nevermind that the city doesn’t even have the cash to do this themselves, the board of Supervisors smells money and they can’t resist getting their fingers in some of that Thanksgiving pie.

Rather then reward free enterprise for finding creative solutions to a social problem, the board of turkeys would rather ensure that the government retains central ownerships of the wifi network. Their plan then is to build and own the network and then to try and lease access to it to people like Google. Not only do they want to screw Google and Earthlink by invalidating all of the work they’ve done to date on this, but then they want to screw them again by trying to charge them money to give away broadband on their network.

If I was Google or Earthlink, I’d tell the board of Supervisors to kick rocks and refuse to buy access to their network regardless of what they charged. If the San Francisco board of Turkeys really thinks that extracting ad revenue out of web surfers is that easy, then force them to do it instead.

Critics of the mayor’s plan have pointing out issues with the proposed free wifi network not being fast enough, not being able to easily go above two stories and not offering enough privacy protections for the citizens, yet these are all red herrings designed to delay the implementation of the plan, while the critcs worked towards their real end game, controlling the network themselves. Once the city provides these services, none of these issues will go away and yet these same critics will quietely forget to bring them up because they never cared about the limitations of wifi to begin with, they only cared about embarassing the mayor and trying to get a piece of the free wifi pie.

Because of the showdown between the Supervisors and the Mayor, San Francisco citizens have once again seen their interests set aside over petty local politics. While the upcoming vote on the issue will likely mean the end of the road for Google and Earthlink and the beginning of an expensive technical and bureaucratic process for the city, Google and Earthlink can at least take comfort in the fact that Mike Tyson is now working at Heidi Fleiss’ stud farm in Nevada, in case they ever want to get another taste of what San Francisco politics are really like.

Posted on November 21st, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Technology