LinkNYC is getting way more press than it deserves. Nobody wanted LinkNYC in the first place. Nobody asked for it. At present most New Yorkers do not even know what LinkNYC is. In this TV-tabloid piece NBC’s I-Team makes it sound like the Links’ seemingly glacial rollout discriminates against the poor.

The I-Team makes one point I think is prescient: Free Wi-Fi is not hard to find in Manhattan. LinkNYC is an advertising-first platform. The gift of connectivity CityBridge purports to give its homeless is little more than a vestige of New York Telephone’s 1980s deal with the city to place advertising on its payphone enclosures. This was intended to subsidize the telco’s money-losing payphone operations. We are living with the remnants of that deal long after payphones had become irrelevant.

LinkNYC corporately huddles under the seemingly unassailable presumption that they are replacing the city’s thousands of payphones.

Guess what: We didn’t need those, either.