If you’ve noticed with dismay the lack of posts from me in the past few days, I’d like to put you in touch with the management of the hotel I’ve been staying at this weekend. This delightful establishment, which because of a football game is currently home to several thousand people in orange and black shirts, does not offer free internet access.

Like any self-respecting hotel this side of the twentieth century, they DO have wireless internet available, but at the price of ten dollars of my hard-earned funds for each 24 hours of email checking and other cyberspace revelry, it’s a bit difficult to justify.

Now, what I find particularly baffling about this difficulty is that these charges are common with the nicer variety of hotels, while the local Motel Earwig typically has 24-hour, totally free wireless internet in every room. In fact, it seems as though, since 2007 or so, a motel is just a hotel with free Internet and lower room rates. Hotels, I’m afraid, are a dying species.

This whole idea of charging a daily rate for internet access is fairly medieval, after all. I mean, by the time Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa, the taverns, travelers’ hostels, and Starbucks had all figured out that charging for the use of their WiFi hot-spots was completely uncool. As far as I’m concerned, internet access is a basic utility, like water or heat. I know plenty of people who have no phone line or cable television in their houses, but DO have high-speed internet. For a hotel to extort extra money from its guests by depriving us of internet access is like assessing a separate fee for the use of water in your room.

It’s as though you rolled into your hotel room around eleven at night and stepped into the plush bathroom for a quick shower to unwind, and found a small card informing you that you would need to call housekeeping and charge $12.95 to your credit card for the privilege of running water for the next 24 hours.