By next year, Italy
will allow public wifi access to the Internet, says Interior minister
Roberto Maroni. The new legislation, highly criticized for
restricting wifi connections for security reasons and, as a
consequence, blocking the process of modernization in Italy, ‘allows
us to lift restrictions … that have now been superseded by
technological evolution,’ Maroni told the press. After the bomb
attacks in London in 2005, Italy passed a series of antiterrorism
restrictions on wifi access in public places, which required wifi
providers to prove the identity of users and track their Internet
activity.