Columbia Law School's Tim Wu (my second reference to Wu in two days) has this piece in Slate today that sums up how free municipal Wi-Fi plans have cratered. He blames the failure of this once-hot notion on the fact that so many cities approached the job as a public-private partnership instead of investing the funds needed to commit to full-fledged public works projects.
By 2005, it became clear that major cities didn't really want to build out Wi-Fi networks as public works projects. Instead, places like Philadelphia and San Francisco announced "private/public" partnerships. That meant giving a private company the right to build a wireless network and try to make money off of it. Often, this simply meant giving a company like Earthlink the rights to install Wi-Fi devices on street lamps and charge citizens for access. The cities then washed their hands of the issue of success or failure.
The result in most areas is a telecom "Bay of Pigs," where "the government wanted [it] to happen but left [it] to underqualified private parties to deliver." Yes, that's right. Few cities have funds in the coffers to take on a costly communications project without help.
And Wi-Fi is costly, in large part because the technology, built to be hyper-local, is an operational and deployment nightmare when scaled up to big geographic areas. Wu downplays the inappropriateness of Wi-Fi for cities by noting that college campuses, which can be pretty darned big, have Wi-Fi everywhere.
Some observers blame these failures on Wi-Fi's technical limits. Wi-Fi does have serious limitations, but wireless Internet technology has worked well even on large college campuses.
But college campuses are typically circumscribed areas and university Wi-Fi networks are supported through parents' tuition, fees, grants and endowments. Cities, by their very nature, are huge, complex and diverse places (University of Pennsylvania occupies only a tiny portion of the city of Philadelphia, for example, and is an homogenous, centrally-run section in the middle of a jumbled and diverse urban landscape) and typically rely on taxes to support services.
There's no comparison between a university and a city-wide communications network. Otherwise, Wu is right. Private companies such as EarthLink can't build a Wi-Fi system unless they charge for service, and most such city-authorized Wi-Fi services stink in comparison to cable and DSL.
In typical configurations, municipal wireless connections are slower, not dramatically cheaper, and by their nature less reliable than existing Internet services.
These facts, as Wu notes, "have put muni Wi-Fi in the same deathtrap that drowned every other company that peddled a new Net access scheme."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)In a swift move to contain the political fallout from its very bad decision to block text messages from NARAL Pro-Choice America, Verizon Wireless has reversed itself by fixing "the process that led to this isolated incident."
In a statement posted on Verizon's Poliblog, company executive Jeffrey Nelson said that the decision to block the message on "an important, though sensitive, public policy issue" was based on an "incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy."
"We have great respect for this free flow of ideas and will continue to protect the ability to communicate broadly through our messaging service," Nelson added.
The quick decision to step away from a political landmine is a shrewd move on the part of Verizon Wireless and clearly smarter heads prevailed at the company (Nelson said that "senior Verizon Wireless executives immediately reviewed the decision"). Still, the "isolated incident" and "dusty internal policy" excuses will give cold comfort to those people (I'm not one of them, btw, but Verizon really scared me this time) who already fear that the absence of some kind of common carriage requirements will lead to corporate censorship of important ideas.
Blogger Scott Karp wrote a post yesterday about "Five Reasons Why the Mobile Web Sucks." Karp, formerly the Director of Digital Strategy for Atlantic Media, has become something of a blogging phenomenon, partially due to his ability to astutely articulate obvious trends in the publishing world in a meaningful way and partly due to his great headline-writing capabilities.
Often Karp's posts don't quite match the promise of the headlines, and I would say that was the case with this particular item. But hey, it ain't easy to produce consistently interesting copy. That didn't stop Karp's item from getting a lot of play in the blogosphere.
One blogger, however, seems to have been pushed over the edge by the disconnect between the headline and the blog post. Russell Beattie, who just recently returned to blogging, posted a retort of sorts to Karp's item entitled "Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 People Need to Shut The F*ck Up about the Mobile Web."
Except there was no asterisk in Beattie's headline -- I inserted it. Indeed, Beattie pulls no punches at all in his take-down of Karp, sprinkling his rant with all kinds of expletives and insults. He calls Karp a moron. He writes "No sh*t Sherlock" in response to Karp's complaint that mobile screens are, well, small, a complaint that Beattie says is a "f*cking dumb-ass criticism."
You get the drift. It's a no-holds barred, profanity-laced screed that seems like an overreaction to a fairly innocuous blog post.
Whatever Beattie's complaint about the substance of Karp's criticism of the mobile web, it has been, if not overshadowed by his liberal use of the word f*ck, then undermined by his use of the word. Clearly Beattie has gotten an earful from people because he wrote a follow-up item, replete with expletives, defending the F-word. Beattie writes:
You'd think these f*ckers have never watched the f*cking Sopranos before...
What happens when someone reads the word f*ck, anyways? Is there some sort of physical reaction that I don't know about that deserve such dire warnings? Like when epileptics see blinking lights and go into seizures? Are there really Pollyannas left out there that are so offended by the word they just keel over from their keyboards fainting dead away at the impropriety of it all?
Well, yes, people do have physical reactions to that word because it is a taboo word, one that evokes strong feelings and is generally reserved, in polite society anyway, for very, very extreme circumstances. Every society deems certain words to be so strong that they should be used sparingly. That's why the F-word helps to underscore the importance of the utterance. It's a flashing red light that says "trouble here" or, to borrow from Arthur Miller, "attention must be paid."
A wonderful academic paper was published last year by Christopher Fairman of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law entitled, simply, "F*ck," but without the asterisk. (PDF version of the paper here.) In it Fairman, who was pleasantly surprised that he got the paper published under the unredacted, single word title, lays out in detail the history of the word and how the law has come to punish those who use it.
He argues, rightly, that the legal system shouldn't muck about in society's use of taboo words (and he contends that the F-word should be used more so that it loses its taboo status, a contention that Beattie would certainly agree with). But there's no doubt that most people react at some primitive level to use of the word.
F*ck is a taboo word. According to psycholinguists, its taboo status is likely due to our deep, subconscious feelings about sex. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship.
It's OK to use the word when it really matters. As Mathew Ingram writes:
I have nothing against a little swearing to make a point -- in fact, I'm in favour of it. And I like a strongly-worded critical polemic or two (and have written my share). But to me, Russell’s post seemed so angry and over the top that it made me wonder what else was going on
And the law should take an extremely narrow approach when it restricts people from using or hearing that word, in whatever literal or colloquial context it's uttered. But, Scott Karp's blog item doesn't rise to the level of importance that the F-word applies. And Beattie really needs to check his anger.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:01 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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