Carrying coal to Newcastle

As the Chronicle breathlessly announced today, our friends at AnchorFree Wireless have hooked up the Castro and "a four-block swath of Fillmore Street". (I am certainly willing to bet that swath is all north of Geary!)

I am sure the residents of those neighborhoods, as well as the folks camped out around a giant cappucino in the cafes, appreciate the coverage.

San Francisco as a whole, though, might be better served by providing service to neighborhoods where people don't all already have service.

I predict that if the question of spending significant amounts of city money on hooking up San Franciscans to the internet comes up, we'll hear a number of news outlets claim that a) "private enterprise" has shown that they're willing to wire the city, and b) that some huger percentage of San Franciscans already have internet access. In both cases, however, these claims will ignore the fact that the private companies are cherry-picking the wealthiest (and so far, anyway, the whitest) neighborhoods to hook up.

What's more disturbing from the article, however, is the news that the cable and telecom industries' campaign to outlaw municipal broadband has reached Sacramento. We'll look into this one and find out what the story is.