BART isn’t selling internet access, or for that matter coffee. People get on the train because they need to, and there isn’t another company offering a competing train around the corner. Whether or not they offer cell phone access on their platforms is going to have approximately 0 effect on their ridership numbers.
Then why do they offer it? They’ve got a monopoly; they don’t have to; it’s just a good customer service feature. Makes people happy. Then how do you think the customers feel when it isn’t there any more when they count on it?
But the position isn’t hypocritical. You are changing his argument in order to call it hypocritical.
For example, let’s say I approve of the killing of Al Qaeda terrorists, but not innocent children. I may think that it is right to kill people who threaten my life, but it is wrong to kill people who do not threaten my life. However, you may say that I am a hypocrite because both terrorists and children are humans, therefore I am a hypocrite to want to protect some humans but not others. However, you would be creating a straw man of my position in order to label it a hypocritical position.
xtisme has explained his logic pretty clearly: if someone has a contractual agreement with a cell phone provider, the provider should not abrogate that contract to deny service to its customers. It is reasonable to assume that there is no contract between BART and its patrons for the provision of cell phone services, therefore if BART wants to suspend that convenience, they would not be violating a contractual obligation. His argument is all about contractual obligations.
He is clearly stating that parties should live up to their contractual obligations, and where there is no contract, any additional service is optional. However, you are trying to re-characterize his argument into something about “from the consumer’s point of view, they have no cell service no matter who is taking the action” and then labeling that argument as a bit of hypocrisy. That’s making a strawman of xtisme’s argument. Your version of his argument isn’t about contractual obligations, it’s about whether the public ever has to deal with the absence of some particular service.
Yes, they offer it because it improves the customer experience. That doesn’t mean that they’re obligated to provide it, or that they’re not entitled to stop providing it. As for the customers, I’m sure that taking it away annoys them, which doesn’t mean that they have a right to cell phone service, and certainly doesn’t mean they won’t get on the train the next day.
I’m really not getting what point you’re trying to make here.
Well, it is not as if BART shut the service off capriciously, or often. They turned off the repeaters because they believed that was an effective way to try to control potentially disruptive flash-mob protests at busy stations.
How do you think the customers would feel if they were not able to get off the trains on their stops because of people who coordinated their efforts through cell calls?
How would you feel if riders couldn’t report an emergency since the communications were cut off? Would that contribute to public safety?
It cuts both ways, my friend. Not all communications are bad, but BART decided to censor them anyway.
Passengers should not be expected to report emergencies, and any system which relies on the riders’ personal private phones to report probelms is doomed from the start.
That is the motorman’s responsibility, and they somehow managed to perform that function for years before cell phones were invented and will continue long after cell phones become obsolete.
It does cut both ways, but in this instance the number of passengers affected by the possible flash mobs, and thus unable to enter or exit the trains, is far higher than the number of passengers who were likely to experience an independent emergency.
Musicat essentially seems oblivious to the concept of legal responsibility.
Good business and legal responsibility are not the same thing. If I own a coffee shop it is good business to keep coffee stocked and to continually have it available for purchase. It may also be good business to keep a WiFi hotspot running at all times my store is open. However I am not legally required to have coffee available at all times and neither am I required to have a WiFi adapter running at all times.
I don’t think anyone would disagree BART turning off their freely provided cell phone repeaters decreased customer enjoyment of riding the trains. Just as me turning off a WiFi hot spot in my coffee shop decreases enjoyment of my business by my patrons. However, unless I’ve sold them pre-allocated WiFi minutes or something ala an internet cafe, I have no contractual obligation to provide that service. I also have no contractual obligation to keep coffee available. But if someone gives me money for coffee and I take it, I now have a legal obligation to either provide that coffee or to provide a refund. If I do neither that is civilly actionable.
AT&T doesn’t provide cell access to be nice or because they want to be good to their customers. They do it because that is their business, if they didn’t, they would no longer be a business entity, their share price would go to $0.00 and everyone would lose their jobs. Further, because they have chosen to operate in the telecommunications business, which is massively regulated, they do not have the freedom to shut down service on a whim just because they “feel like it.” While wireless providers are regulated a little bit differently from wireline, they still have lots of regulations that they had to agree to before they were given licenses to utilize the public wireless spectrum.
BART most likely has never agreed to any of those regulations because they have never purchased right to use wireless spectrum, that is why they operate repeaters and not cell towers, because BART does not actually provide any form of wireless access, they just expand the access someone else creates.
Further, BART’s legal responsibilities almost certainly do include keeping the transportation system running. With that in mind, I would argue if the BART leadership felt turning off the cellular repeaters would avoid massive disruptions to the functioning of the transportation system they would actually have an obligation to turn off those repeaters. (I’m not arguing turning off those repeaters helped or hurt, that’s beside the point.)
I live in SF, so I’ve been following this issue with interest. The wrinkle no one has mentioned (that I’ve noticed) is that BART’s position on shutting off the repeaters is intimately related to its position on whether it has the right to prevent protests on the platforms. The latter is a debatable question, but BART’s position on this point has some merit relating to the public safety issue. If we grant the latter, the former probably follows. (Both are free speech issues.) So, what we really should be discussing is the right of protesters to disrupt service.
Frankly, I don’t see it. ISTM, such protests aren’t about expressing a point of view. Rather, they’re an exercise in self-empowerment. “Honey, I have some bad news. Mommy is mad at Daddy, but I can’t spank Daddy, so I’m going to spank you because that will make Daddy sad. Sorry it sucks to be you, but I’ve got to do something and this is the only thing I can think of.”
Censor is not the right word here, since it assumes that some communication is blocked based on content. All communication was blocked here - the organizers, hypothetical people who wanted to call a gang to beat the crap out of the protesters, people saying they were going to be late, and people wishing to say what a good job BART was doing.
Frankly, I don’t go into subways expecting to have cell service. It would be nice to have it, but I’m not heart-broken when I don’t. BART is well within their rights here.
Picture a skyscraper. The landlord has decided to provide cell repeaters in the elevators, as a courtesy to their tenants/customers. Then a group of kids decide to 'hijack the elevators, and plan their movements/escapes through cell phones. The landlord can’t turn off the elevators for safety reasons, but they sure as hell can turn out the repeaters, forcing the kids off the elevators to communicate with each other, thus freeing up the elevators again. (Yes, I know this is an oversimplification).
I’m reminded of Louis C.K.'s bit about getting on the airplane when inflight internet service first rolled out, and having a fellow passenger bitch when the brand new service he had no prior expectation of getting stopped working.
If BART riders want to take this all the way, BART should take the signal boosters out completely.
Again, though, BART is not being challenged as a business. BART is the elected government. The examples above all talk about this in the context of what a private business can and can’t do, but another thing a private business generally can’t do is violate the First Amendment’s protection of expression. It doesn’t say in the constitution that everybody gets coffee and email access from Starbucks if they want it. You can’t take Starbucks to court for violating your right to free speech, because Starbucks can’t really do that. BART can.
[QUOTE=Jimmy Chitwood]
Again, though, BART is not being challenged as a business. BART is the elected government.
[/QUOTE]
Again, though, the government does not have a mandate to ensure that private companies provided services are forwarded to any citizen who wants to use them. BART is not a communications provider, or a carrier of any kind. They were providing forwarding communications services as an additional convenience to their customers, not as some sort of gods given mandate to any citizen who wants to use it.
How is it a violation of the First Amendment? Let’s say we are talking about a news paper. For the convenience of train passengers the government gives away a free news paper to the riding public. But for some reason, the government chooses not to provide those news papers on Tuesday because they are worried that train users might make them into paper boats and plunge the Republic into civil war. How is this a violation of the 1st Amendment? The government is not blocking the sales of news paper outside of the train station. They are merely not giving away free news papers on Tuesday to the riding public. True, there are now news paper stands in the station (which is why the government was giving them away for free before…as a convenience to the riding public), but the buying public could just walk outside and buy a paper on the street, and the government is not attempting to block that at all.
This is pretty much the exact same thing. I think that the confusion in this thread stems from a lack of understanding of just what happened here. AFAIK, the government didn’t block communications (i.e. they didn’t attempt to jam signals coming into their station). They didn’t ban cell users from having their cell phones either, or attempt to confiscate them. They merely shut off repeaters that they put in to forward signals from private carriers into areas where the private companies hadn’t provided for signal to their customers. It was a free service they were providing, not a mandate.
It doesn’t say in the constitution that the government is obliged to provide communications either. The government is under no obligations to distribute private communications. Unless you have a different copy of the Constitution than I’m reading.
I suppose you could do both. Whether you win or not is another matter. All depends on how good your lawyer is and what kind of judge you get. Obviously, lawyers can twist things into any way they want (the law is not set in stone, but instead cast in wax). They may very well be able to twist this into a win…which would mean that government agencies WOULD be required to provide communications services to the public and to forward communications from private companies. That would be interesting (and costly) for us to implement, and I have to wonder what the ramifications would be, aside from a hell of a lot of cost. Would the government (Federal? State? Local?) have to create an SLA to the public to ensure that Sprints signal gets into every government facility? Or only existing facilities that already forward signal from private carriers? What if the repeaters go down due to faults? Would that be a violation? What about dead zones where the repeaters don’t get to? Which carriers would the government be obliged to repeat the signal for? I have Verizon, but what if they only repeat Sprints signal? What about local or regional carriers? Them too? What about foreign carriers? Them as well?
-XT
This is something that I’ve been concerned about. I’m not real knowledgeable about cell phone technology, but what if someone had a heart attack or someone wanted to call home to check on their kids. Would BART’s actions have prevented these sorts of calls from going through? If not, I don’t have a problem with their actions. If so, I’m definitely concerned with a government agency shutting down speech it doesn’t like.
BART’s actions, by shutting off the feed they set up to bring carrier signals into the subway tubes (where the commercial signals do not reach) would have prevented anyone from making a call in or out.
This is not a Free Speech issue; it is a “look at your phone and see that you have no signal” issue - they are restoring the dead zones that they patched over with their own repeaters.
BART’s job is to get riders safely from one station to another. Providing cell service along the way is a perk, and not a requirement of this mission.
And – again – that doesn’t matter, because they were doing so:
So there’s that.
I didn’t say this was a violation of the First Amendment. I said that whether or not it is a violation of the First Amendment, it’s not true that BART is allowed by the First Amendment to do all the things a Starbucks can do in the same situation. Many of the posts in this thread make the comparison to what a private business does, but we’re talking about BART. The particulars of the newspaper thing aside, I would hope that you’d agree that the government exercising selective control over people’s sharing of ideas with each other is different from some shift manager’s doing the same thing. Complaining about what happened with BART is not stupid because a coffee shop shuts down its internet all the time. I think that’s worth pointing out.
Not to be combative, I hope, but I think the confusion on this point is really just that you don’t want to hear what I’m saying. I don’t think anybody claimed that the government is obliged to provide communications services; you just keep saying they aren’t. I understand what BART did: they had a system in place to repeat cell signal, and they shut it down. That is what I’ve been talking about. What I’m saying is that taking away a forum that they’ve already provided is different from not opening up the forum in the first place. It doesn’t matter that they could have never opened up the station to communications. They did open it up, and then shut it down. Since the thing they shut down involved people’s desire to express themselves, there’s a First Amendment question there that wouldn’t be there if a laundromat did it.
Maybe you think it was justified under the First Amendment one way or another, and you aren’t going to get an argument from me. But it misses the point to talk about it like the government had no obligation whatsoever, or to treat complaints as if they’re calling for mandatory government cell coverage.
[QUOTE=Jimmy Chitwood]
I said that whether or not it is a violation of the First Amendment, it’s not true that BART is allowed by the First Amendment to do all the things a Starbucks can do in the same situation.
[/QUOTE]
Why? Why is BART obligated to forward signals from private carriers? Under what law, rule or regulation is BART required to do this? Simply because they did it in the past that puts an obligation on them to continue to do so in the future?
Because the signals in question are coming from private carriers, not a government provider. BART is simply forwarding signal into places where the private carrier didn’t make provision for, and thus has no service into. Again, where does the obligation come from for BART to provide those services? What law, charter, SLA or whatever come from that obligates them to do so?
No, I wouldn’t agree that this characterizes what happened in this situation, at least as far as I can determine. If BART went out and deliberately blocked signal it would be a different matter, and I’d agree that this would be a violation of the users rights to communications. This isn’t what happened, however, so, again, I ask you…what specific law, rule, code, charter, SLA or whatever obligates BART to forward communications from private companies to their customers?
I think it’s worth pointing out that the situation is basically the same. BART is under obligation to provide transport services to the public…and even then, they could shut those down in the name of public safety. Saying that they are obligated to forward private companies cellular services begs the question…what obligates them to do so? I’m asking here, because I’m in essentially the same boat. Many of my buildings have cell relays and WiFi for the public. Where does my obligation come from to ensure that those services are up for the public all the time? Where is the law that prevents me from turning them off for any reason or no reason at all?
We’re just talking here…I’m not being combative at all. I hear what you are saying, though like you (conversely), I’m unsure if you are hearing me. Again, tell me where the obligation comes from for the government to provide forwarded communications services for a private company. What law, charter or SLA is involved in this, and what are the parameters.
But that’s exactly what you seem to be saying. If the government isn’t obligated to provide those communications services why are they obligated to forward communications services from private cellular carriers??
The forum only existed as a convenience…again, what is BART’s obligation to forward communications from private carriers? Where does it derive from? Those carriers have SLA’s between themselves and their customers. How does BART factor into that mix? Forget about Starbucks for a moment…take my own building here. It’s a State of New Mexico building. We provide the public with WiFi and forwarded cell services much like what it sounds like BART was doing. If I shut off WiFi to the building, what am I in violation of? Time Warner is the internet provider, and Verizon and Sprint are the cell carriers…we only act as an intermediary, and offer a service that is strictly for convenience. So…where does the obligation come from for us to HAVE to continue those services to the public, regardless of the situation? Simply because we are the government and we provided those services (as a convenience) in the past, we are obligated to continue to provide them?? Why?
Bummer. Why does that obligate the government to provide those services, and what is the extent of the obligation? Let’s say that the buildings core goes tits up and we lose internet connectivity. That mean the public can sue us for the loss of signal? Can they bring criminal charges as well? What if I have to do maintenance on the system and thus take it down? Same thing? Or am I only obligated to keep up a free service we provide to the public (above and beyond what the folks they are actually paying for this service offers) if it’s during an emergency or public protest? Seems to me if we are obligated to maintain those free services above and beyond what their provider provides then you’d have to do that all the time…no special circumstance. Right?
Why is there a First Amendment question here that is different than if the laundromat or Starbucks did the same thing? Again, though I’m sure you are sick of hearing the same thing over and over, where does the obligation come from that the government has to provide these services that are above and beyond what the private provider is able to provide?
I am looking at this from a services perspective…I have no idea if the First Amendment justifies this or doesn’t, because to me it doesn’t come into play in this situation. And yeah…if you say that the government has to provide those extra services just because they provided them in the past, that DOES make it mandatory.
-XT
Let me ask you this, tho, xtisme: what law permits BART to shut down a private company’s equipment? Can any government entity, without a court order, merely proclaim a “public safety issue” and shut down a private company’s equipment?
ETA: You seem to be both arguing that it’s not BART’s equipment, but it’s a service that BART provides. Which is it? If the equipment doesn’t belong to BART, then how can BART be providing the service? And if it isn’t their equipment, then what gave them the right (and the legal power) to shut it down?