I'm amazed by some of the comments like "Wow great article. I knew there must be a way to avoid paying." and by author's apparent believe that contacting the support several times via twitter and not getting a response morally justifies sharing his recipe with other people and wishing them "Happy “free” surfing, for now anyway".
Stealing is stealing, no matter what "justification" one may have about high prices.
"This bakery's bread is OKish, but $10 is too much to pay for a loaf. But I found a cool trick: when you're offered to take a free sampler, you can actually take the whole lot while the owner is not watching.
I sent him couple of postcards telling about this but he never responded, so enjoy this free bread while you can!"
Given that GoGo is like 3.1 megabits shared between dozens of people on a plane, yeah.
Also, the "marginal cost of information/bandwidth/etc is zero" is specious. You are not entitled to get things for their marginal cost. I can't take a Prada handbag out of store and leave the $50 marginal cost of the bag + $10 for restocking.
Internet access on board of a flying plane is non trivial and certainly doesn't come free: you need to install and maintain equipment on board, maintain a network of ground stations, write and debug some software, pay money to other internet providers etc.
With relatively small number of paying customers (yet), you have to keep prices high to maintain the profitability of your business.
Think about this: if nobody pays, they will close this service. Just like the bakery will close if nobody pays for the bread.
If you steal something from someone then you'll have the item in question in your possession afterwards while the original owner does not have it any more. Access to the internet is nothing you can steal.
Of course that is no justification for using the provided service without paying for it, but it's fundamentally different from theft.
(This will be my last post on this thread because I think I've now gotten into a mode where everyone's just downvoting whatever I say.)
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.
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.
>>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.
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?
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.
The entire thesis of why illegal filesharing is not theft is because it is a victimless crime (presuming the pirate was not going to purchase the software anyway.) Stealing bandwidth on an airplane is not a victimless crime, since it reduces the amount of bandwidth for everyone who has paid for it. This is a pretty elementary concept and I'm not really sure why you are twisting things around so much. It's no different than if there was a 10 gallon jug of water on a desert island and you were supposed to pay $5 to take a drink, and some guy comes over and starts chugging it down without paying. That person is stealing since they are using a scarce resource that others are required to pay for.
By the same analogy, downloading multigig torrents is also not a victimless crime, since it also reduces bandwidth available to those that paid for their internet access? Heck, even downloading anything reduces bandwidth for everyone else, because bandwidth is not unlimited.
Your access would be affected just as badly if I were to pay for access. It's hard to say that any other people on the plane are negatively affected by this particular act when they would have been affected just as much if someone were paying.
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.
Only to the extent that one would have to pay to enter the carpool lane and free drivers would be excluding those who have paid. Otherwise, there's no theft going on, but rather just a violation of any traffic laws.
I wish more people understood this argument. Hollywood lobbyists have brainwashes a lot of people to equate piracy and stealing. When people like you or I try to disentangle them , there's often a knee-jerk accusation that we're somehow endorsing piracy.
Copying information means you have two copies; sharing a public good means there is less to go around. Even if the piracy case is somehow justified by the "I can't steal something if you never know I took it" argument, that simply isn't the case with something like Internet access. As a demonstration: shared Internet access is subject to tragedy of the commons in a very clear and direct way that music piracy is not (especially if you take into account "enforcing the laws against pirates doesn't cause most pirates to pay, they just consume less or not at all").
> I'm amazed ... by author's apparent believe that contacting the support several times via twitter and not getting a response morally justifies sharing his recipe with out people and wishing them "Happy “free” surfing, for now anyway".
The article alludes to further conversation via the image containing the Gogo employee's email. I established contact with Gogo via email and made my intentions clear about my desire to post such an article. After receiving an initial reply that another Gogo employee would contact me, I heard nothing from them after a number of days -- note the eight days between initial twitter contact and article posting.
The primary purpose of the article was not to provide a formula for free Internet (that was just the "cover" to the article), but rather to detail how allowing access to any one Google service can result in access to the entire Internet. In retrospect, I admit the comment at the end of the article is not consistent with the point I attempted to convey.
They should charge whatever makes them the most money per flight. Unless a competitor to GoGo comes along, or using cellular devices is allowed on planes, it is likely a good decision short term and long term.
jonafato mentioned in another comment that they could use the price to control usage rates, increasing the price to keep the number of users down and the bandwidth:user ratio up.
I agree with you. I consider using GoGo's internet connection without paying for it to be stealing.
However, the article intrigues me because connecting to the outside internet is like a giant puzzle looking for a solution, which would provide plenty of in-flight entertainment. I don't consider that immoral (since you're not actually using the resulting connection), but I suppose if you get caught trying to hack through their system you'll get in some kind of legal trouble.
Stealing is indeed stealing, but this isn't stealing. It's unauthorised use of a computer service. The unauthorised user isn't permanently (and unlawfully, without permission) depriving someone of something they own, so it isn't theft.
"Stealing" carries meaning and emotional reactions than are not applicable in this case. Yes, it's wrong; no, it isn't theft.
No, you see, using the service in a way not intended by the provider would be, for example, setting up your laptop as an ftp server from the airplane. This is different since it's pretty obvious you are circumventing measures put in place to force you to pay for access.
The real take-away from the article is that by allowing access to _any_ Google service, access to the entire Internet is indirectly granted. This knowledge has applications well beyond "stealing" Internet on air planes.
Stealing is stealing, no matter what "justification" one may have about high prices.
edit: grammar