Marriott Hotels are lobbying hard over at the FCC to block your personal wifi signals.
Earlier in 2014 the FCC fined Marriott $600,000 for blocking wifi signals its Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville. Apparantly Marriott didn’t think convention center guests had the right to their own personal wifi spots, regardless of whether they had fully paid for the meeting space. Now Marriott is filing for the ability to kill any Wifi network on their property that they want, claiming it’s for the good of the guests.
Google and Microsoft are strongly opposed.
“The petition, filed in August and strewn with technical mistakes, has received a number of formally filed comments from large organizations in recent weeks. If Marriott’s petition were to succeed, we’d likely see hotels that charge guests and convention centers that charge exhibitors flipping switches to shut down any Wi-Fi not operated by the venue. The American hotel industry’s trade group is a co-filer of the petition, and Hilton submitted a comment in support: this isn’t just Marriott talking.
But there are big guns in opposition, including Google, Microsoft, and the cell industry’s trade group, the CTIA. Even Cisco’s “support” of the Marriott petition seeks to minimize the extent to which a rule clarification would affect most users.” [ via ]
this actually will make me reconsider staying at one of their hotels. NOT COOL
That’s so wrong!
Well, I know of one hotel chain that I’m now going to block.
What a ridiculous business decision.
When wifi is blocked, it leads the way for other places to block too. Scary.