You obviously don't fly much. This is you stealing access from me when you're on a platform meant to have just a handful of paying users.
I would just like to point out that I said more than once that I am not trying to justify the behavior described in the original article. Maybe I just didn't make myself clear enough, or people really just disagree. But all I've been trying to say that this illegal behavior does not run under the heading "theft".
The reasoning is similar to why illegal file sharing is not theft - it is copyright infringement.
It is also not relevant whether a paying customer will have less bandwidth to their disposal if someone accesses the internet service on a plane for free because the paying customer would also lose the same bandwidth if another /paying/ customer would use it. Thus the paying customer would not be able to sue the one who accesses the internet illegally.
The access provider could, but not for theft.
- 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.
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Edit: formatting, clarity.
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?
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.
No, the real issue here is that GoGo wants to have it all -- they want to have Wifi and they also want to charge individual users. A better plan would be to rent either wired access or to rent a "mifi"-style device that would require payment for N devices to access the Internet. It would be a bit more infrastructure to deploy, but if GoGo were really concerned about this sort of theft then this would be obvious.
I think the reality is that GoGo does not really care about the service provided to their customers, and that as long as most fliers remain ignorant about ways to evade the payment system GoGo will continue to provide their service.