Municipal WiFi: Bloggers Beware
Category: Internet... Local... Navel Gazing... Thinking Allowed...
Posted Monday, March 05, 2007 at 09:25 AM [GMT-6]

An article in this weekend's Midland newspaper described several "WOW" projects being considered by the city, and among them is the implementation of citywide WiFi.

At first glance, this seems to be a wonderful idea, and at least a couple of people over at Jessica's Well profess great enthusiasm at the prospect of dumping their current ISPs in favor of the municipal option. I've given the issue literally minutes of thought and have come to the conclusion that I won't be one of them.

There are a lot of unknowns in the proposition, including pricing, reliability, and security. What is not unknown, at least in my mind, is that giving control over my internet access to the government seems foolish.

Last Tuesday, my internet access went missing all day due to a still-unexplained technical problem at my service provider. Annoyed as I was at the interruption, I felt confident that the company was (a) doing all it could to get things back online, if for no other reason than to minimize the chance of losing customers, and (b) the outage was not intentional. Perhaps I'm naive and paranoid, but as much as I personally like and respect most of the people I know in our city government, I cannot bring myself to assign those motivations to any government entity in a generic sense. Nor can I count on having our government perpetually staffed by people with noble intentions.

The folks who should be most skeptical of government-provided WiFi are those who consider blogging to be a valid form of journalism. I fall into that category, although the reality is far less impressive than the concept, given the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio we currently experience in the blogosphere. (And I count myself in that non-journalistic ubër-majority -- most of the time.)

Blogging does have the potential to play an important role in keeping citizenry informed, but it has the distinction of being a medium in which its practitioners have little control over the actual dissemination of the information they generate. Very few of us know how to independently build and maintain a backbone to the internet; we're at the mercy of folks who have the technology and willingness to do that for us. Up to now, those folks also need what we're willing to trade in exchange for that access. The real question is whether we can say the same thing about the government.

In closing, I'd like to address one additional piece of that article, a quote by one of our city councilpersons to the effect "...government should compete with the private sector as long as it can beat it." The previously linked post at Jessica's Well took issue with that statement, but I happen to agree with it. In fact, I wish that was the cornerstone of all government endeavor, for if the government actually limited itself to only those things it can do better than the private sector, I think we'd be in much better shape overall.