Over on Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell has a thoughtful post (kinda goes without saying on that blog, I suppose) on the implications of broadly available public WiFi. I'm particularly intrigued by her discussion of WiFi as a "public good":

This raises an interesting question - to what extent is a wifi hotspot a public good? It’s neither purely indivisible nor is it, depending on registration requirements and network monitoring capability, entirely non-excludable. Bandwidth is finite, so it is to some extent a rivalrous good. It all depends on who owns the system and how it’s set up of course. But, over time, the trade off between network efficiency and user convenience may also tend toward registration requirements which will provide a means to prevent bandwidth hogs doing their thing.

So much of the current discussion of WiFi availability focuses on technical and economic issues and obstacles, rather than sociological issues. But Maria's assessment of WiFi potential ends with a much more social scientific prediction:

At least in the early days of wifi, the technology probably will be used by early-adopting criminals (amongst others). Forget infrastructure and rollout costs. Liability, risk, and the expense or impossibility of insuring against them are the most likely candidates to smother wifi at birth.