Spanish Government Turns Off Free WiFi In Barcelona
from the forget-philly... dept
While there's been a ton of coverage concerning the bill in Pennsylvania to stop municipal broadband offerings, and how that could derail Philadelphia's WiFi plans, there's a more interesting case over in Barcelona. There, the city had already set up a free WiFi system, though it was quite limited. It was designed so users could just view 60 websites related to information and services for the city. However, even though the system was already built, and only offered in this limited way, the Spanish Telecommunications Market Commission has forced the city to turn off the network, claiming it violates competition rules (found via Broadband Reports). It's hard to see how a WiFi network that only lets you visit 60 specific websites is competing with anything, but apparently those are finer points that the Commission didn't want to bother explaining. It's also difficult to see how the added competition of another network can go against competition rules. Isn't more competition a good thing?
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Competition
It's similar to the Internet Explorer/Netscape browser wars. The competition between two separately installable browsers was good. It became bad when Microsoft bundled IE into Windows.
As you've said many times before, perhaps the government should just set up the infrastructure and let the businesses set up plans for using it.
However, I mainly agree with your point that this seems ridiculous given the limit of 60 city-related sites that could be visited. I suppose the business group could argue that this takes money away from businesses that cater to providing Web access to tourists, who would be less likely to use those services if free tourist information is available from the city itself, but I don't know if any such business existed.
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Re: Competition
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Re: Competition
As basic human needs include food and shelter, I'm sure you also support free housing and food for everybody, too. Why have those greedy farmers and construction workers gouging the public when a typically efficient government agency can meet our needs.
I look forward to more of your insightful posts.
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Re: Competition
Why would A.C. support that? He, like yourself, seems to oppose taxpayer supported government services. By the way, haven't you ever heard of toll roads?
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Re: Competition
Second, I don't necessarily oppose taxpayer funding of things. I was suggesting why businesses might oppose it.
Nope. What are they? (Yes, that was also sarcasm.)Seriously, I thought of mentioning toll roads in my post, but those are typically run by the government anyway. I realize there are a few that are private or quasi-private, but how many exist today?
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I'm so glad I left...
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