Obvious Diversion

San Francisco has chosen Google and Earthlink to offer city-wide wifi. Some details from the New York Times:

Under the proposal from Google and EarthLink, Google said it would provide free access over the 47-square-mile city, but that access would be at modest speeds of 300 kilobits per second. Megan Quinn, a spokeswoman for Google, said that the company had not yet determined how and whether it would subsidize the free access.

“At this point, we don’t know exactly how we will monetize this service,” Ms. Quinn wrote in an e-mail message. She declined to speculate whether Google planned to pay for the service by delivering paid advertisements to users. “However, like Web search, our goal is to create services that satisfy the information needs of users while also creating new markets for advertisers and local businesses,” she said.

In addition, EarthLink said it planned to offer higher-speed access of 1 megabit per second for $20 a month, a fee that would support the $15 million cost to build and maintain the system over 10 years.

So, to break it down, Google and Earthlink are going to offer wifi service that will be too slow for the majority of applications that are coming around the corner. When you do use this too slow connection, they will then likely use your personal information from searches and your current location to make a fortune off of personalized location-based advertising. Then, as if that wasn’t enough profit off of the public airwaves, if you want a faster connection you’re going to have to pony up $20 a month for it.

There’s only so much of this air data space for city-wide wifi available. If San Francisco picks one provider, will that then be your only choice for such a service? Will these be government chosen local monopolies for wifi access?

This all sounds like yet another reason for communities to own their own connections and airspace to the internet.