The Ethics of WiFi

I can still remember the first time I encountered a free WiFi signal - it was at the Dana Street Roasting Company in Mountain View, California, and when our consulting company would stop there between meetings (and occasionally to have one) it was great to be able to just connect our computers and work. At the time most coffee houses charged for this service; some actually required you to purchase a monthly or quarterly plan through whoever their Internet provider happened to be. I always felt that unless you were paying extra for the bandwidth free WiFi was a way you could add value for the customer for effectively no cost to the company.  But over the years since even this simple customer convenience has become more complicated, and I suppose it is time we took a closer look at the issue...

First of all, let's consider the issue of freeloaders. Most coffee houses - and similar businesses - already have issues with limited space for seating, and people who will spend days at a time taking up a table (sometimes more than one) without purchasing anything. The WiFi situation just makes this worse -  since this is effectively free Internet service, some people elect to save money by never getting their own ISP and just using public wireless service. Such people are not really customers, of course, and any reasonable business should be able to eject them on this basis, but that will not stop people from making a $1 purchase and then spending 14 hours straight taking up space and hogging bandwidth. The business can impose a time limit, but even if you have the time to enforce such rules it is doubtful that they will add anything to the atmosphere of the place...

Then there's the issue of people using the company's WiFi signal to download material that is illegal, or to commit various other online offenses. Here again, these aren't really customers and should be booted off-line and ejected from the premises, or just turned over to the police. But doing so may still be problematic for the business; there is also a non-zero possibility (in some jurisdictions) of being charged as an accessory to the crimes being committed, even if you had no part in those activities and were in fact the one who reported them. And none of that even considers the possibility of civil litigation (nuisance or legitimate) from parties damaged by the criminal actions of someone using your WiFi to commit said crimes. It's enough to make you consider requiring full user registration and background checks before letting anyone onto your network...

On the other side of the issue, charging customers for anything that has no effective cost (e.g. the WiFi bandwidth costs you the same amount regardless of whether or not anyone is using it) is never good for customer relations. Even if you aren't charging for it, people may consider such restrictions and monitoring to be a violation of their rights to free speech, or just enough of a buzzkill to keep them from frequenting your establishment. And if you are charging for it there will always be accusations of price gouging and deliberate obstruction of full access. Requiring a password may prevent your neighbors or people in passing vehicles from hijacking your signal, but it may also frustrate legitimate customers, especially if they are given the wrong password or are simply too inept to enter it correctly...

Which leads me to the question: does a business offering wireless connectivity as a value-added service to its customers have any ethical obligation to provide that service to non-customers who find a way to gain access to the signal? Does such a business have an obligation to provide free access in the first place? Does our answer change if the bandwidth isn't costing the company anything in the first place? Alternately, does a company that provides wireless connectivity have an obligation to prevent random users from committing crimes using its signal? If so, does that obligation limited to actual paying customers, or does it extend to anyone who can connect the the signal? Or should any company offering WiFi service just accept these risks as part of the price of doing business and just let the chips fall where they may?

It's worth thinking about...