1133 Public Internet

Many communities were finagled into giving cable companies monopolies, to the point of denying new competing technologies from entering the market. The cable giants like to exercise their monopoly power by jacking prices and there’s no place for customers to go. The solution is to break those monopolistic deals; let WiFi towers come in and get some competition going. Elon Musk’s Starlink will certainly break open the market. But even without that, users themselves are circumventing the prohibition by setting their personal Internet service so that it can be shared by anyone around, called “hotspots,” and products are emerging that automatically connect across them as people travel: it’s essentially free public Internet with no government intervention. Cities certainly must recognize that connectedness has become an important societal goal: they’ve got to quit being lobbied into inaction because they’ll just be left behind.