My neighbors haven't complained because I'm not doing anything particularly radical with my router. But if I started swamping their signals I imagine they would be annoyed about it. I thought this context was obvious in my post above.
The article suggests two: social norms, and aggressive enforcement against actual offenders--as in the Marriott case.
And people who disagree with our perspective thought the Marriott case was a big government shakedown. I am disinclined to rely on social norms, given that there are often substantial economic rewards for flouting them.
> My neighbors haven't complained because I'm not doing anything particularly radical with my router. But if I started swamping their signals I imagine they would be annoyed about it.
But you're not swamping their signals. Neither are the vast majority of people who have routers. So the vast majority of people are not hindering each other by broadcasting. That includes many people (like me) who have routers with third party open source firmware on them (I run OpenWRT). Just saying "well, someone could swamp others' signals" isn't enough to justify pre-emptive regulation; that should require showing that enough people are swamping others' signals to make ordinary enforcement insufficient.
> people who disagree with our perspective thought the Marriott case was a big government shakedown
How do you think those people would view pre-emptive regulation by the government?
> I am disinclined to rely on social norms, given that there are often substantial economic rewards for flouting them.
I see the economic incentive in the case of a large corporation like Marriott (and that's why I mentioned them in connection with enforcement, not social norms). But for ordinary users who just want to run routers in their homes? Social norms seems like a reasonable way to regulate in that case.
The article suggests two: social norms, and aggressive enforcement against actual offenders--as in the Marriott case.
And people who disagree with our perspective thought the Marriott case was a big government shakedown. I am disinclined to rely on social norms, given that there are often substantial economic rewards for flouting them.