What if everybody did it?

You can tell when someone has crossed the bridge from adolescent to adult. Usually, their all-purpose argument — which rarely works, by the way — changes from “But everybody’s doing it” to “But what if everybody did it?”

The early returns on last week’s column about the unauthorized use of wireless LANs fell into the “But what if everybody did it?” category, although that ended up being only 12.7 percent of the 55 responses received. Some of the writers predicted the collapse of the ISP industry if everyone decided to take their laptops, and I suppose even desktops, and park outside someone else’s house to use the Internet for free.

I don’t find this a compelling argument for a lot of reasons. The most important one is that we can apply it to almost any situation and the outcome will be predictably disastrous, but I don’t think it gives us a good ethical answer — and it’s rarely true that everybody will do it, or even want to.

Suppose I’m thinking of quitting my job and going off to India to replace Mother Teresa. Is this a proper thing to do? Well, what if everybody did it? With millions of Americans going off to India, institutions and business here would collapse. It would be a terrible economic crisis. So, using this logic, it’s not the ethical thing to do, because “If everybody did it,” it would lead to disaster.

The quickest answer is that not everybody’s going to do it, whether it’s go off to India or access the Internet from a sidewalk somewhere. In fact, a couple of people wrote in to tell me that very few people were engaging in unauthorized wireless access, and the phenomenon was blown out of proportion. I thank them for proving at least my first point. However, no matter how few people are doing it, I think the issue is worth discussing.

A significant number of respondents — 20 percent — were worried about bandwidth. They thought that unauthorized users could chew up paid-for bandwidth and thereby deprive the “owners” of something of value. I think this argument has some merit, if it’s the case that the owners of the wireless network have a metered service, or the unauthorized users are doing such intensive tasks that they degrade the whole system.

However, in the case of most users — especially residential — there is more than enough bandwidth to go around, and much of it goes unused. I pay for 24/7 connection to the Internet. I use it 8-10 hours a day. And most people I know use it far less. What happens to the available bandwidth the rest of the time? Is it saved up somewhere? If someone doesn’t connect to the Internet for three days, do they have more available when they do connect?

Some people were concerned that high-demand applications being run by an untold number of sidewalk users would deny customers to the ISPs, eat up available bandwidth, and bring the industry to its knees. While that’s certainly within the realm of wild possibility, it doesn’t seem likely that power users are going to want to shiver on the sidewalk while going about their daily tasks on the Internet.

My suspicion, which I think is more likely, is that any use of this nature will be casual and limited by people who already have their own Internet connection at home. They would use this method of connecting while they were out and about. In fact, one person suggested that people using open wireless connections could actually increase business because it would spur people on to buy wireless devices if they knew they could use them other places than the confines of their own home.

A fair number of people — 14.5 percent — were concerned about security of their own system or worried about what the free-riders would do using their IP address. What if they were terrorists or accessing kiddie porn? These are very legitimate concerns. It doesn’t answer the question I discussed, about whether benign use is unethical, but they are real issues about which people should worry. My suggestion to anyone who has these concerns is to do whatever is necessary to protect your wireless network, and to do it as soon as possible.

Another 14.5 percent confused the issue with an intrusion onto someone’s property. How is this any different, they say, than someone who taps into your cable to steal the Internet connection or who goes down the streets trying doors to see which are open and then helping themselves? The case of using open Internet connections is far different from that, and it’s that difference that raises the ethical issues.

When someone uses your open wireless connection, they are not intruding, connecting (at least physically), or invading what is commonly thought of as your property. You are propagating emissions into the public airwaves. The question is, once those emissions leave your property, unprotected by surrounding wires or cables, do you have any claim over them or how they’re used?

The only analogous situations we have is in the satellite industry. There are some laws that cover these situations, but the laws were passed at the behest of the satellite companies and probably represent their own interests more than the ethical crux of the matter. This makes me extremely suspicious of trying to draw any ethical lessons from them.

Interestingly, 16.3 percent of people who responded didn’t think there was anything necessarily wrong with the practice, although some had concerns about misuse. No one offered any well-developed arguments about why they thought it was OK, so I can’t respond to them.

The largest single group — 18.4 percent — had various ideas, all of them opposed to such use, but few of them supported a case that the practice was unethical. Some made the fatal error of starting from the premise that the practice was theft and then “proving” that it was wrong because theft is wrong. In philosophy, we call that begging the question — appealing to the same principle trying to prove. It could also be called circular logic. If you want to say that the practice is stealing, you need to show why it is.

Some were concerned about what the Terms of Service of the ISP said. Although the TOS may have legal force, I find most of them ethically suspect and wouldn’t necessarily look to them to give me any valuable ethical guidance. Some TOSes specify that you can’t have more than one computer connected to the incoming cable, but that depends on how you define “computer.”

If you count your AP (access point) as one device, then you could satisfy that requirement. The various computers in your house are connected to the AP and not directly to the cable. I know that’s hair-splitting, but that’s why lawyers get the big bucks. In years past, the phone company used to tell you how many phones you could connect to your line. They soon found that technology outstripped their ability to police that restriction and have since backed off.

Some people assumed that I felt unauthorized use of wireless networks was ethical, and that’s not accurate. My intuition is to say it’s not, but I always like to start from the neutral stance, rather than my intuition. I start from the premise that I don’t know and try to build a case one way or the other. My problem was that I couldn’t come up with a convincing argument for why it would be. I’m glad to see from my mail that I’m not alone.

I had started the discussion with my discovery of the practice of “warchalking,” finding and marking locations at which a person could find unsecured wireless networks. I limited my discussion to the actual access. Warchalking may have its own ethical considerations independent of accessing the network. In other words, accessing a network may be ethical and warchalking may not, but that’s another discussion.

As with so many other things in a rapidly changing technological landscape, we are encountering new and different situations and sometimes the old rules don’t apply as well as we’d like them to.

Write to Carlton Vogt at ethics_matters@infoworld.com. To discuss any of these issues, you can go to the Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics .