I operate a public WAP as part of the seattlewireless project. I do this for two reasons:

- Not being able to access the internet seriously sucks. It took a month to get DSL in my apartment, and every time I wanted to check my mail in that month, I had to go to a coffee shop, or to work. Nobody in my building had an open point.

- It's a legal hack: Since my ISP never sees the MAC addresses of the machines connected to my router, there's no way to prove what traffic came from what. This may prove handy if the government drops the hammer on people who accessed the wikileaks cables.

For these reasons, it would suck if public wifi was killed. A more elegant solution would be auto-negotiated SSL tunnel to the router, over which all traffic would be routed. Protection from eavesdropping, without denying access to users.