Early in 2016 I wrote about a very interesting and potentially useful communications network coming to New York City called LinkNYC.

The systems were to provide free WiFi, charging ports, phone calls around the country and more. Due to some pretty disgusting reasons, one feature was recently removed from LinkNYC.

According to Gothamist, “after reports of people using the LinkNYC kiosks to view porn—and masturbating in public—LinkNYC has decided to pull the plug on web browsing“.

Web browsing has been removed while they look for ways to fix the issues. One idea is to put time limits on using the kiosks.

There are currently 400 kiosks around NYC but they haven’t been getting used according to how the city had hoped. Gothamist mentions how the homeless hog them up!

The kiosks weren’t meant for people to camp out and watch videos, surf the web or make calls for hours. They certainly weren’t installed for people to watch porn and masturbate at! I could only imagine somebody walking by a LinkNYC kiosk with young children and having to witness that disturbing scene!

For now, the kiosks will still offer super fast wifi, free calls, maps, a place to charge devices and more. Maybe web surfing will come back one of these day, most likely with lots of restrictions if it does.

Find out more from Gothamist here.