One Big Hotspot

It was OneWebDay.org's third annual "Earth Day for the Internet" program at Washington Square Park in Manhattan and all the participants had their heads in the cloud.

The cloud? Why the promise of an open, wireless spectrum, of course.

"The cloud has existed for more than a decade," said Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University. Access to it, however, is the challenge.

"I advocate a much wider, shifting spectrum," Lessig said. (That would be the kind that would free me from ducking into West Village bistros with WiFi to write this brief.) "We need to have much broader spectrum."

Google and others have been urging the Federal Communications Commission to open up access to the wireless spectrum. The commission last spring instead auctioned off more than $16 billion in spectrum licenses.

But free access remains a rallying cry.

Jonathan Zittrain, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, asked the crowd of about 50 whether they were allowing others to "steal" from their WiFi.

More than a dozen raised their hands.

"Communists!' Zittrain declared, to laughter.

Karen Donovan

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