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by skinnybatch
4276 days ago
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Or, you can travel in our limousines, which will drop you at the front door, or instead, you may arrange for a cab, which may only drop you off at a designated cab dropping location, conveniently 3.2 miles away from our front door down at the bottom of the hill. Are we going to treat WiFi according to airspace protocol? Can a company or operation claim ownership to a quasi-physically-contained airspace? Perhaps invoke claims of trespassing by other non-approved, non-financially viable, sources? If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI. |
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That's one way to look at it. But it doesn't square with an important fact, namely that under U.S. law, you don't own the RF spectrum, even though RF waves happen to exist "on" "your" property.
Keep in mind that in a civil society, property ownership and the autonomy that goes with it are largely social constructs that can and are limited by the rest of us. Marriott might imagine that it "owns" a conference facility and can do what it wants with it. Certainly for most purposes that's a reasonable approximation of the truth. But: Marriott gets to exclude, say, Alice from walking into the conference facility, not by virtue of some natural right, but solely because the rest of us have tacitly agreed that our police and, ultimately, our armed forces will back Marriott up if it chooses to do so.
(That is, of course, unless Marriott happen to have access to a militia or other armed force; @Rayiner has written about related topics in other threads here.)
And whether Marriott likes it or not, the rest of us, via our duly-elected or -appointed representatives, have decreed:
1. that the public airwaves are no one's private property; and
2. that in certain circumstances, "tying" arrangements, in which a seller requires a purchaser to buy an unwanted product or service B as a condition of being able to buy wanted product or service A, are unlawful --- that is to say, the seller's autonomy in respect of its goods and services only goes so far. [1]
It's therefore not an incoherent argument that Marriott may not require Alice, while in the conference facility, to use only Marriott's expensive WiFi network, as opposed to using, say, the phone in her pocket as a WiFi hotspot of her own.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce).