Maroni, the minister of free wifi

Roberto Maroni died, e you don’t need to be a Northern League supporter to feel sorry. He was a kind person not only in the last years of his life, struggling with a relentless disease but also when he had the opportunity to exercise a lot of power, first as Minister of the Interior and then as President of Lombardy.

Maroni has not never stop being nice and to try to shorten the political distances with the others, who were often there, with a smile. He was passionate about digital and worked hard to spread it even if not always successfully, as when he embarked on a maxi purchase of 24,000 tablets to get Lombards to vote to the referendum on autonomy; after the vote they were intended for schools, but too late it was realized that they were inadequate. Waste of money, basically.

But in this seat of Maroni I would like to mention something else. The battle won for free wifi. In Italy, public wifi has long been banned due to a law that bears the name of a Berlusconi interior minister, Beppe Pisanu. The law had been approved as a reaction to two terrorist attacks in Europe, the idea being that terrorists could communicate more easily using Internet cafes, which were fashionable at the time. It was basically bullshitand it didn’t take long to understand that while the law was useless as a tool to fight terrorism, it was extremely harmful for the development of the Internet in Italy.

Yet from extension to extension it lasted several years and different governments, even of the left (the police forces liked that provision): it took Minister Maroni to repeal it at the end of 2010. Public wifi has been free in Italy for 11 years. It may seem obvious, but at the time, for joy, many of us went to the squares to turn on free hotspots for everyone.