Filtering, etiquette questions arise as airlines introduce in-flight Internet access

NEW YORK — Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep.

Welcome to the promise of the Internet at 33,000 feet — and the questions of etiquette, openness and free speech that airlines and service providers will have to grapple with as they bring Internet access to the skies in the coming months.

"This gets into a ticklish area," said Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's chief inventors and generally a critic of network restrictions. "Airlines have to be sensitive to the fact that customers are [seated] close together and may be able to see each other's PC screens. More to the point, young people are often aboard the plane."

Technology providers and airlines are already making decisions. Some will block services like Internet phone calls altogether while others will put limits and install filters on content. And traffic-management tools that are frowned upon on terra firma could be commonplace in the air.

Panasonic Avionics, a Matsushita Electric Industrial unit testing airborne services on Australia's Qantas Airways, is designing its high-speed Internet services to block sites on "an objectionable list," including porn and violence, said David Bruner, executive director for corporate sales and marketing.

He said airlines based in more restrictive countries could choose to expand the list.

The company also is recommending that airlines permit Internet-based phone calls only on handsets with wireless Wi-Fi capabilities — the technology delivering access within the passenger cabin. Bruner said the company believes Wi-Fi handsets use less bandwidth than telephone software that runs on laptops.

Airlines, he said, also could block incoming calls — and the annoying ring tones they produce — or designate periods of quiet time.

OnAir, which has European certification for airborne cellular services, plans to give airlines similar choices, Chief Executive Benoit Debains said. Although some airlines are concerned about noise, Debains said, enabling voice would generate more revenue than data-only services.

Air France, which plans to start allowing cellular calls through OnAir within months, said it would see how people use such services before crafting rules.

"Are you going to reach your wife to tell her what you did the entire day or just tell her, 'Can you pick me up at the airport?' " Air France spokeswoman Marina Tymen said, adding that passengers might tell the airline that data services fulfill all their needs.

U.S. airlines are largely taking the opposite approach.

With possible exceptions for crew and federal air marshals, flights on American Airlines and Alaska Airlines won't have access to Internet-based phone services such as eBay Skype.

Discount startup Virgin America also is considering a ban.

"An airborne environment is a confined environment," said Charles Ogilvie, Virgin's director of in-flight entertainment and partnerships. "You don't want 22B yapping away or playing on a boom box."

Airlines have offered in-flight phone services before, but their high costs have limited their popularity. By contrast, Internet phone calls are free or cheap, particularly for passengers already paying for in-flight access to check e-mail or surf Web sites.

Meanwhile, American, Alaska and Virgin have no plans to filter sites based on their content.

Alaska, which plans to start offering service on some flights in the spring, said the same guidelines apply whether a passenger is flipping through a magazine, watching a DVD on a laptop or surfing the Web.

"Occasionally we do have conversations with customers about content," Alaska spokeswoman Amanda Tobin Bielawski said.

The in-flight services also could exacerbate long-standing grievances.

What if the passenger in front of you wants to recline, making it difficult to surf comfortably on your laptop? What if you're finishing a crucial e-mail on deadline and an adjacent passenger needs to leave for the bathroom? What if the person next to you keeps peering over while you're trying to review a confidential Web site?

Steve Jones, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who specializes in Internet studies, said passengers and flight crews would need to undergo "the kinds of learning the ropes and learning the etiquette anytime we put new technology in new settings."