I love WiFi. I'm an addict. It started about a year ago, when I bought a card for my old Toshiba laptop (which is rapidly being taken over by the kids), and a new laptop with a built-in card and a D-Link router, which I attached to the cable modem that sits (for various complex reasons) upstairs in my house. Then I tried to connect from my little office in the basement, and (of course) I didn't get a signal from my system — although I got a nice strong one from a neighbor.

I'm a good boy, though, and I don't steal broadband. So I bought a book and talked to my friend Annalee Newitz and discovered that I needed to worry not only about my signal going through two floors but the shape of my WiFi field. I bought a repeater for the first floor and then another repeater for the other side of the (fairly small) house and made parabolic reflectors and moved everything all around upstairs and downstairs, night after night, walking back and forth with my laptop, trying to see where the signal was best.

It was so much fun I almost forgot that I still didn't have any signal at all where I most wanted it.

So I finally got out the Makita cordless and started drilling a lot of holes in the floor and walls until I found a way to snake 70 feet of cat-5 wire from the upstairs to the basement, where I could plug it into another repeater, and now I can sit five feet away from my desk, in my beautiful orange thrift-store Laz-Z-Boy, and work on my laptop while I watch golf on the TV. Which is a sign of how far I've come in life.

So I'm all in favor of Mayor Gavin Newsom's plan to wire the entire city for WiFi. I still won't get the signal in my basement, but that's OK: I'm sure I can create some sort of aluminum-foil-and-chicken-wire parabolic antenna on the roof and beam it somewhere and waste even more time with this sick little fascination.

But I'm very nervous about the city's current plan to cut a deal with Google and Earthlink. The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks Google isn't offering adequate consumer privacy (the giant company, of course, wants to track users so they can sell ads based on where you live). Media Alliance is concerned that there's nothing in the proposal to guarantee hardware and training for low-income populations (which undermines the entire idea of public WiFi bridging the digital divide). I hate the way all of this has been so cloaked in secrecy. (High-tech firms are obsessed with avoiding public scrutiny of anything that might even vaguely relate to "trade secrets.")

San Francisco has a very bad history of negotiating exclusive vendor deals. Comcast, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Clear Channel, the Mills Corporation ... every time we try these special deals or public-private partnerships, the city gets screwed. The lawyers cut a deal, bring it to the board, and say it can't be changed — and that's that. This time around, the supes have to get involved early on — and the negotiations simply have to be open and public. There are huge issues here, and they can't be settled with a handful of people in a back room.

And by the way: Now that we're going to have a vast fog of WiFi enveloping ...