Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

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> It is the right of universities and employers to disallow WiFi hotspots as a condition of being on the property.

Citation, please? This is an area of the law with which I'm not too familiar.

I do recall from dim memory that private-property rights aren't without limits. For example:

+ The (U.S.) National Labor Relations Act puts limits on an employer's right to prohibit employee collective action on the employer's property;

+ Similarly, various civil-rights acts prohibit the owner of a business from refusing service to people on impermissible discriminatory grounds (race, national origin, etc.);

+ [ADDED:] Anti-trust law places limits on a business owner's ability to say, for example, I'll sell you my patented photocopier only if you agree to buy all your unpatented paper from me as well.

[EDITED:] I'm not saying the first two laws apply in this case. I am suggesting that anti-trust law, and perhaps federal communications law, might analogously limit the ability of the owner of a business to require guests, as a condition of admission, to forego their lawful access to the public spectrum. That practice seems roughly analogous to the conference company saying, "you can attend our conference, but only if you travel to the conference center in one of the expensive private limousines that we've arranged for, instead of in a cab."

Or, you can travel in our limousines, which will drop you at the front door, or instead, you may arrange for a cab, which may only drop you off at a designated cab dropping location, conveniently 3.2 miles away from our front door down at the bottom of the hill.

Are we going to treat WiFi according to airspace protocol? Can a company or operation claim ownership to a quasi-physically-contained airspace? Perhaps invoke claims of trespassing by other non-approved, non-financially viable, sources? If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI.

Refer to jacquesm's post [0]:

>Because (1) a jammer is an unlicensed transmitter and (2) jammers do not just jam with discretion they jam for as far as they reach and it is impossible to operate a jammer in such a way that you cover all the territory without extending beyond it in some places.

Jammers can interfere with people's ability to contact emergency services. Obviously in the case of WiFi this is not an immediate concern because 911 is currently reached through a different wavelength, but WiFi is integrating into infrastructure (WoT, etc...) such that jammers can be a real cause for concern (especially if they are operated by poorly trained people).

>If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI.

What about the scenario where you have an ISP that offers city-wide WiFi to its subscribers. A Marriott is within the bounds of this area, they block access to a service I pay for and they have approval to provide me with. Who is in the wrong?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8407399

> Can a company or operation claim ownership to a quasi-physically-contained airspace? Perhaps invoke claims of trespassing by other non-approved, non-financially viable, sources? If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI.

That's one way to look at it. But it doesn't square with an important fact, namely that under U.S. law, you don't own the RF spectrum, even though RF waves happen to exist "on" "your" property.

Keep in mind that in a civil society, property ownership and the autonomy that goes with it are largely social constructs that can and are limited by the rest of us. Marriott might imagine that it "owns" a conference facility and can do what it wants with it. Certainly for most purposes that's a reasonable approximation of the truth. But: Marriott gets to exclude, say, Alice from walking into the conference facility, not by virtue of some natural right, but solely because the rest of us have tacitly agreed that our police and, ultimately, our armed forces will back Marriott up if it chooses to do so.

(That is, of course, unless Marriott happen to have access to a militia or other armed force; @Rayiner has written about related topics in other threads here.)

And whether Marriott likes it or not, the rest of us, via our duly-elected or -appointed representatives, have decreed:

1. that the public airwaves are no one's private property; and

2. that in certain circumstances, "tying" arrangements, in which a seller requires a purchaser to buy an unwanted product or service B as a condition of being able to buy wanted product or service A, are unlawful --- that is to say, the seller's autonomy in respect of its goods and services only goes so far. [1]

It's therefore not an incoherent argument that Marriott may not require Alice, while in the conference facility, to use only Marriott's expensive WiFi network, as opposed to using, say, the phone in her pocket as a WiFi hotspot of her own.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce).

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