This SILLY article suggests several unlikely scenarios where on board WIFI, a superb innovation coming to several airlines, will be a nuisance.   Loud talking on phones?   Porn surfers?    Well, maybe, but I think this is one of the *billions* of examples where having more broadband access makes a better, not worse, world.    Has he bothered to note how much these things are problems at airports with free WIFI like Las Vegas or Portland, Oregon?     They are NOT problems.

Looking for the gray cloud on the silvery lining of ubiquitous broadband reminds me of the early days of the internet (ahhh – those were the days back in, what….the 1990s?)  when people would explain to me how they didn’t really need email addresses and business websites because this was a passing fad or a “tech thing”.    It didn’t help much to explain that the internet is not about technology, rather it is about people, and that they’d be online very soon.     Now of course everybody is online, but the reporters are explaining to us (again) how all this technology puts us all at great social and personal peril. 

No, it doesn’t.  Get over it, and move on.   You cannot cheer enough for innovation and ubiquitous broadband.   We’ll have it eventually and it’s better to have it sooner not later. 

Hmmm – speaking of Airlines and Airports here’s my Airport Codes website.