Marriot Back-Pedals On Wireless Blocking

gurps_npc writes "Marriot Hotels had been illegally blocking Wifi hotspots in Nashville. They thought they owned the airwaves inside their hotel and wanted to charge guests for using them. They claimed to be 'surprised' they were breaking the law. Other hotels have complained to the FCC, asking for permission to do it legally. The FCC had fined Marriot $600,000 for their actions, among other things. They have stopped their illegal blockage, in part because of public backlash and in part because the government told them they were criminals.

Comments

How could they?

[gstoddart]

They thought they owned the airwaves inside their hotel and wanted to charge guests for using them

How uneducated do you have to be on the topic to believe this? Me? I'm betting some corporate lawyer said they could probably get away with it.

If they sincerely believed they owned those airwaves and could do this, they utterly failed to ask anybody who knew anything about it. That level of ignorance is either epic, or willful.

I think this is more likely a case of them knowing damned well they weren't supposed to, hoping they'd get away with it, and now pretending like it was all an honest mistake. At some point, someone said "ummm, guys, we can't legally do that" and was told to STFU.

I'm glad this got smacked down. And I wonder if movie theaters and other venues won't get caught doing the same thing.

It's about time corporations got reminded they aren't the ones defining what's legal and what isn't.

Re:How could they?

[gstoddart]

I think this could be a legitimate mistake.

So, imagine you're a multi-billion dollar corporation with business interests in many countries. Failure to investigate the legality of this is a risk to shareholders.

If the board of a company with a market cap of over $20 billion dollars is too stupid to find out if this plan is legal ... they're idiots.

Because those people don't do much without checking with the lawyers to make sure their asses are covered.

So, no, I'm not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to them. I believe someone knew this to be illegal, and decided to do it anyway -- possibly with the hope that someone would side with them.

I'm not prepared to cut them any slack. It's their damned job to understand this stuff if they're going to implement it as policy.

If ignorance of the law is no defense for me, then I sure as fuck expect a multi-national company to be held to the same, if not higher, standard.

Re:How could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough, there are laws that prohibit such clubs. They're called anti-prostitution clubs, and such locations are referred to as brothels.

Just like there are laws that prohibit actively jamming devices, which is what Marriott was doing. The only way to passively jam a wireless signal is to build a Faraday cage around the place, which is totally fucking stupid. Also questionably legal, since you'd be cutting off cell service and emergency response GPS locators, which would inevitably lead to lawsuits if someone slipped in the shower or some shit and couldn't call 911 from their cell phone.

Glad to hear they were punished, but ...

[King_TJ]

Just to play devil's advocate here.... The newer wireless access point products on the market like the Cisco Meraki gear encourage this sort of behavior, with their "Air Marshal" capabilities. They're designed so you can actively DoS wi-fi routers that appear on your network, "unauthorized".

They even have an extra radio integrated in them for this functionality, separate from the ones handling the rest of the wireless traffic.

So arguably, the I.T. folks who set this whole thing up for the hotels might have done so with intentions of preserving the integrity of the paid hotel wi-fi network, and not because "they mistakenly thought they owned all of the airwaves inside the hotel building". It's still an asshole move to set something like this up, IMO ... but a hotel chain that charges for its wi-fi could reasonably argue that it's in its best interests to ensure its paying customers get a good, reliable signal with it. That could be compromised with hundreds of guests setting up their own APs in their rooms.

Re:the 'costanza defense'

[Penguinisto]

Dunno if we "pray" to them - it's just that most folks are tech-ignorant and are preyed upon because of that. I noticed crap like TFA first-hand.

I was at a Marriott in ATL (okay, Alpharetta) in late 2013, discovered crap like this (yet they were more than happy to charge $14.99/day for access to their SSID), and promptly decided to change hotels after the 2nd day (I was too busy to swing it on day one). I spent the rest of the week (and my employer's money) elsewhere. I specifically mentioned the wifi shenanigans as a reason why I changed rooms (especially since the La Quinta down the street was far less expensive, the hotspot worked perfectly, and atop that, their wifi was free of charge.) Reimbursement was not a problem after I explained why, and the company I worked for at the time decided to take their future business elsewhere (as a tech company, network access ranks as pretty damned important...)

Vote with your dollars, and even if traveling on business, be damned certain that your employer is aware of why you're doing so, which translates into less money for the offenders. It won't be fast, it won't be easy, and inertia allows asshat corporations to continue their asshattery for awhile, but if the issue is important and broadcast widely enough, withholding patronage does indeed work.

Incomplete summary

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

We're not talking about them blocking wireless hotspots in guest's rooms, that's just overlap. The issue is that they were blocking wireless hotspots in convention space they were renting out, so the individual conventioneers and exhibitors HAD to buy the Marriot wi-fi package at exorbitant prices.

Actually I was quite happy about them doing it

[goombah99]

I know I'll get hammered for saying I was in favor of what marroitt did but here me out. When I travel, I'm terrified of connecting to hotel networks. I don't really know which of the many possible SSIDs that I see are the bonified hotel network. And since it's normal on Hotel networks to do some DNS redirection to hand you off to the authorization site, you really can trust anything that masquerades in that way either.

Thus I'd gladly forego the trivial inconvenience of them blocking my wifi tether to my phone network (to bypass the hotel network), if they would take charge of their airwaves and block all rogue hotspots in their building. Peace of mind.

Now the litmus test here would be, are they just doing that to make money by taking away something I have for no extra cost (my cell phone tether) or do they really have my interests at heart in squelching hostile wifi hotspots? And that's really easy to figure out. If they allow short range blue tooth then they haven't taken anything away from me. I can still tether just as well as I could before.

So I gain peace of mind and lose nothing of value if they do this. Why should I not like this.

Now I suppose someone could dream up an edge case like say a LAN party or maybe some poor-mans meeting where one fellow is hosting all the others on his little conference room server. But that's so narrow a case ocmapred to the millions of guests all of whom just want a safe casual ad hoc connection to check their e-mail. Lan pary people too cheap to pay for the connection can probably figure a workaround anyhow.