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I don't normally take sides in these arguments, but I think you're misunderstanding the economics of this situation. This isn't analogous to file sharing, becau

I don't normally take sides in these arguments, but I think you're misunderstanding the economics of this situation. This isn't analogous to file sharing, because file sharing doesn't affect the availability of the original file. Consider these numbers (made up, but probably not wildly inaccurate): - Access costs $10 - Total bandwidth available is 5Mbps - 10 users purchase access for an average of .5Mbps per user If 10 more users pay for service, the original 10 are getting half of what they used to for the same price. In response to this (see other comments about "gouging"), airlines raise the prices of access. This act preserves some minimum level of service for those who are willing to pay. If, instead of the scenario above, the second 10 users go on to use the service without paying, the first are "cheated" out of being able to get their minimum acceptable level of service even if they would choose to pay a higher price. When this happens, prices can be set arbitrarily high without having the intended effect of reducing the strain on the network. Based on this logic, I disagree with your analogy to file sharing, but I also agree with you that this is not theft. It's more akin to pollution than anything else. If one chooses to smoke in a bar that doesn't allow smoking, everyone else suffers. In the same vein, if I access this service without paying, all of the paying users really do get less than they're purchasing. The airlines are left with two choices here: 1) Plug the hole so this is no longer possible. This is the path they'll choose because it's profitable and it satisfies the already-paying users. 2) Open it up for everyone. This is impractical. If you've ever used Wi-Fi on a Bolt or Mega bus, you know that it can be painfully slow. There's no incentive for the provider to upgrade, because they can't profit by doing so. This isn't really about taking from the big, bad corporations. It's about taking from your neighbor. It would be great if we had in-air broadband, but until that day, we'll have to find some way to regulate the use of a limited resource to prevent it from becoming over-saturated. ----- Edit: formatting, clarity.

Zombieball 14y ago
I like your scenario. I am curious though, lets say this issue went to court and the airline was charging the wifi 'thief' with stealing. The case would only pertain to the single flight the thief stole internet access on. And on that particular flight, regardless of whether or not the thief paid or didn't pay he would be reducing the available bandwidth to other customers. Sure in the long run the airline can play with the pricing of their service to try and limit the number of active users on any given flight, however the price of the service would be locked for any single flight. So doesn't kleiba's analogy of illegal file sharing still stand?
- jonafato 14y ago
  IANAL, so take the legality of this with a grain of salt: The airline would not have the right to charge the "thief" because the airline is not the victim. The only people able to charge the polluter (sticking with my other analogy) are those who paid for access to the network or someone representing them. They wouldn't do this because 1) it's kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and 2) the damages are far smaller than the cost of taking action. The sensible way to do this (if stopping the practice outright was impractical) would be to grant some authority (the airline) the power to issue citations related to the pollution. It's then carried out similarly to regulating noise pollution. This is problematic, of course, because it requires identifying offenders. If we can identify offenders, we can simply stop the offense, so issuing any kind of ticket no longer makes sense. This brings me back to a point I made above: the airlines will stop this practice. It's solvable, profitable, and generally beneficial to those who want it enough to pay.
klawed 14y ago
>>This isn't really about taking from the big, bad corporations. It's about taking from your neighbor. It would be great if we had in-air broadband, but until that day, we'll have to find some way to regulate the use of a limited resource to prevent it from becoming over-saturated. If GoGo allows this to continue, it's also about them not prioritizing their customer experience very highly. I've long felt that they should be tuning their firewall to eliminate or minimize unneccessary traffic. I'm not sure what their SLAs are but I've flown enough to know that on any full daytime flight, the intertubes feel very full. If, for example, 1/4 of the passengers forget to put their mobile devices in airplane mode and their devices are conversing google services the entire flight (even though they never purchased or activated GoGo) that alone will likely gobble up a noticeable portion of bandwidth.

Zombieball 14y ago

I like your scenario. I am curious though, lets say this issue went to court and the airline was charging the wifi 'thief' with stealing. The case would only pertain to the single flight the thief stole internet access on. And on that particular flight, regardless of whether or not the thief paid or didn't pay he would be reducing the available bandwidth to other customers. Sure in the long run the airline can play with the pricing of their service to try and limit the number of active users on any given flight, however the price of the service would be locked for any single flight. So doesn't kleiba's analogy of illegal file sharing still stand?

jonafato 14y ago
IANAL, so take the legality of this with a grain of salt: The airline would not have the right to charge the "thief" because the airline is not the victim. The only people able to charge the polluter (sticking with my other analogy) are those who paid for access to the network or someone representing them. They wouldn't do this because 1) it's kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and 2) the damages are far smaller than the cost of taking action. The sensible way to do this (if stopping the practice outright was impractical) would be to grant some authority (the airline) the power to issue citations related to the pollution. It's then carried out similarly to regulating noise pollution. This is problematic, of course, because it requires identifying offenders. If we can identify offenders, we can simply stop the offense, so issuing any kind of ticket no longer makes sense. This brings me back to a point I made above: the airlines will stop this practice. It's solvable, profitable, and generally beneficial to those who want it enough to pay.

klawed 14y ago

>>This isn't really about taking from the big, bad corporations. It's about taking from your neighbor. It would be great if we had in-air broadband, but until that day, we'll have to find some way to regulate the use of a limited resource to prevent it from becoming over-saturated. If GoGo allows this to continue, it's also about them not prioritizing their customer experience very highly. I've long felt that they should be tuning their firewall to eliminate or minimize unneccessary traffic. I'm not sure what their SLAs are but I've flown enough to know that on any full daytime flight, the intertubes feel very full. If, for example, 1/4 of the passengers forget to put their mobile devices in airplane mode and their devices are conversing google services the entire flight (even though they never purchased or activated GoGo) that alone will likely gobble up a noticeable portion of bandwidth.