Last week we found out that Google and EarthLink, with the help of Motorola and Tropos Networks, had been given the sizable task of outfitting San Francisco with city-wide Wi-Fi. This week, the
initiative finds itself at the center of a debate about the role of advertising in the new network, and the effect the project will have on regional telco providers that sell access in the city today.
Users of San Francisco's new network get two choices: a free, ad-supported option from Google at six times the speed of dial-up, or a $20 per month subscription from Earthlink, running at about four
times the speed of Google's network with no added advertising. Just what Google's advertising plan entails is still an ongoing part of the negotiations. Google and EarthLink have received criticism
from the privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying the companies' plan to track users from session to session to deliver customized ads would be "privacy invasive."
Read the whole story at NY Times »
