Nothing has lit up my Hootsuite dashboard lately more than the news that CityBridge eliminated the onboard web browser from its LinkNYC devices. This rather blunt move follows months of complaints from citizens and community board leaders that Links had become magnets for loiterers and derelicts who pull up recliner chairs and watch full length movies on YouTube all day and all night. Others have glommed on to the free cell phone chargers, plugging in their devices and sprawling on the sidewalk while they wait hours for their device to charge.

With less than 400 Link devices in place the amount of attention heaped on them might seem out of proportion to its significance. A large portion of the city’s population did not even know these things existed until their images splashed on the front pages of the tabloids yesterday.

Whatever the case it looks like the “payphone of the future” has had some growing pains. After months of complaints that squatters monopolized the devices and relieved themselves at the kiosks CityBridge finally made it look like they gave a crap about the criticisms directed at their product. Whatever lawyered-up decision making process lies behind the decision to nuke the web browser it seems CityBridge should not have been allowed to get away with ignoring public outcry for so long.

I do not think this will be the last manifestation of poor planning behind the Link project.

I think the next step for LinkNYC is to disable the USB phone chargers. That, and not porn, is behind a lot of the layabouts sprawled on the sidewalks. The devices have the fast chargers but that feature only works on late model Androids devices. It can take hours for some phones to charge.

The debacle has me feeling sad. The poor are being used as pawns in a corporate game of advertising-fueled brinksmanship which puts monetization and ad-revenues ahead of human beings and customer (i.e., community) reaction. What I see is a bunch of people who had no regular access to this kind of connectivity before, and who gravitated to this free resource like moths to a flame. These folks woke up yesterday to find that it had been taken away from them on account of a few bad apples who allegedly filled the streets with porn and public lewdness.

I find it hard to believe the porn viewing was as epidemic as described in press coverage. But it makes for good politics.

It seems tasteless that LinkNYC users are being stereotyped as mentally ill pornography addicts. Dismissed from the conversation is how LinkNYC demonstrated the hunger that some among us have for the connectivity that so many of us take for granted.

It is equally tasteless that the real world we inhabit has become a live action R&D lab for technology and advertising companies. In the case of CityBridge, given their Alphabet/Google pedigree, the “smart city” propaganda they espouse tells us to calm down, shutup, and have confidence and trust in their vision. CityBridge regularly describes LinkNYC as “BETA” and “First Of Its Kind.” These buzzworthy flourishes, bandied about with gleefully exculpatory blamelessness, are offensive. They are corporate-speak for “We don’t know what the hell we are doing.” It is the kind of customer-last thinking that informed the “Fail Up” mentality I knew in corporate. The less connection you had to your customer base the higher you failed up the org chart, until you finally parachuted out to 18 months of fully-paid serenity in your cabin upstate.

Aside from the makers of these devices I may be among the very few New Yorkers who actually wanted these things to be awesome. I welcomed them at first. But now I cannot stand the sight of them. It’s not just the visual avalanche of advertising. I mean they are ugly, don’t get me wrong. One at a time they look like headless and legless giraffes. But taken in their confluence of adjacent units there are spots where you look up or down the Avenue to see a cascading wall of ceaselessly blinking advertisements.

But I find them offensive not just for their æsthetic harshness. Links are becoming a comical manifestation of greed. It’s as if they are putting in Links as fast as possible before the City imposes regulations on their locations and proximity to each other. This would harken back to the mid-1990s, and the rowdy early days of New York City’s independent Payphone Service Providers (PSPs). From 1985 to 1995 the city turned a blind eye as companies like Coastal Communications and Telebeam feverishly installed payphones any place they could find a clear spot on a sidewalk or in an alleyway. The practice took on particular urgency toward the end of 1995, when the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) decided the party was over, and that payphones in the city would have to conform to a wide range of new regulations. The City recognized that they had let the payphone companies run willy-nilly for a decade, and was thus conciliatory enough to grant an amnesty period during which PSPs could make their payphones compliant with the new rules. In advance of those rules taking effect it was said that Coastal, Telebeam, and others worked night and day to install as many phones as they could, so as many payphones as possible could be grandfathered in.

CityBridge’s approach seems strangely reminiscent. With very little regulatory oversight from the City the consortium at Citybridge expects to put 10,000 of these LinkNYC devices on virtually every city street, many of them within just 50 feet of each other. I should bring a tape measure next time because some Links I’ve seen already appear to be closer than 50 feet apart.

The needless overabundance of LinkNYC units is somehow justified by the seemingly unassailable introductory rubric: “Well, we’re replacing all the payphones.” Well, WE DIDN’T NEED THOSE, EITHER. Not so many of them, at least.

I find this debacle to be depressing. The poor used as pawns as a small number of people make a lot of money. Nobody wanted this.

CityBridge’s troubles are not limited to squatters and loiterers. Telebeam – the last surviving New York City-based payphone service provider – has been granted another appeal in its lawsuit against Citybridge and the City of New York. That lawsuit claims CityBridge was granted an illegal monopoly franchise that stifles competition in this new realm of public communication devices.

Indeed, as we see now, the lack of competition in this space means that if you do not like Links or do not want to use them then you are out of luck locating an alternative. There will be no competition in this realm unless Telebeam prevails, or other parties decide to litigate.

With the Telebeam lawsuit continuing to haunt CityBridge it may behoove regulators to reconsider the wisdom of granting a monopoly franchise to a company which has so far delivered only a disastrously inferior “BETA” product.

CityBridge also faces a lawsuit from the National Federation for the Blind, which claims the devices are not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. That litigation demands immediate cessation of installing new LinkNYC devices. As that case moves forward CityBridge continues to plant its Links as far as you can see – and even farther.