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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

What laws exist against a 5ghz ubiquity mesh network? I know that such laws can be challenging. Here, there was a proposed law to charge money for the use of that wireless band. The law was very unpopular however, and was not passed. But I can understand that happening.

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What laws exist against a 5ghz ubiquity mesh network?

That easy: make you liable for what people do on your network. Make it hard to register as an official network provider that would forfeit some of the liability.

https://qz.com/694618/why-is-it-impossible-to-find-free-wi-f...

(AFAIR, in Germany there are some changes now, but it's a good example how Internet sharing is made difficult for anyone without a large legal department.)

I'm not sure what to say to this. I don't think that these challenges make my opinion wrong or invalid. They make me sad, and I'd like to fight against such challenges. But from an idealistic point of view, I don't think that they raise a fundamental problem with my belief in "community networks", merely a legal one which might be able to be fixed through protest and civil-disobedience, and all else failing, revolution (I guess you have to leave revolution on the table, despite the bad results revolutions have had in recent years, if democracy in your country really doesn't work at all).

Mesh networking is cool, but it doesn't scale without at least some cable connected nodes routing the traffic. And those will be impacted by network neutrality.

On an unrelated note, incredibly shady things are currently being done by US corporations in regards to the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum being used for commercial LTE [1]. This is obviously a very slippery slope and would need strong regulation from the FCC. However, the FCC just approved it for live use in February (Pai got into office in January).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum

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