This is different because in all of your examples you are theorizing some sort of service which is provisioned in a manner that is tightly controlled by specific companies and highly regulated by government. The topic at hand is a person purchasing and implementing a device aimed at making it more convenient to use the internet service he or she has agreed to pay for, be it cable/dsl/[whatever-controlled-form-of-high-speed- access]. To my mind if you equate a neighbor hopping on to an unprotected wi-fi network with theft of metered electrical service, you've got the problem with logic, not me.