Plenty of people just think it’s perfectly fine to share the internet they buy. They just think it’s the right thing to do. They can decide to keep it all to themselves. And they can put their router settings that way. Or they can decide to share it, and put their router settings that way. If they share the internet, they might not get their own internet as fast, but they’re saving their neighbors money, or they’re providing internet to people who live in areas that are not served affordably by high speed internet.
That’s just the way it works - some people want to share their internet, to give it away for free.
No problem with that, if that’s what they choose to do. It’s different however if it’s taking advantage of someone who doesn’t know how to secure their wireless.
Look at the original story. How much trouble was created for a guy who didn’t know how to secure his wireless router.
Most internet providers require you to sign an agreement that says it’s for your own use, so allowing your neighbors to hook up might violate your term of service.
But the neighbor would be fine in that case. A good neighbor would ask before hooking up, to be sure. If you are taking your neighbor’s internet, but are afraid to ask because of what they might tell you, it means you probably know better.
I haven’t seen a lot of action on this issue, but the cable company was certainly very active in making sure people didn’t run cable lines between houses to “share” their cable.