Sure there are a few everywhere, but the big gaps are the issue.

For example in your screenshot if you zoom in on Poitiers you'll see there are none there, only in the two northern neighbor communes Neuville de Poitou and Jaunay-Clan. Similar for Nantes, none there, they are all in Saint-Sébastien-Sur-Loire and Thouaré-sur-Loire, the center and all the other suburbs have nothing.

Ah ok yes I see what you mean, Poitiers has none and is clearly some big place

While "Le Bourg" probably a rich place, has a whole bunch of them

Of course getting the density of Poitiers for all of Europe on 120 million for 3 years is never going to happen on this approach.

Even though 35$/month per hotspot is reasonable. It's just not the right approach.
In reality nearly every single building in Europe has an internet connection and wifi routers.

Since there is not really such a thing as "keeping the RF spectrum of wifi to oneself"
The logical approach would have been to socially engineer the default that ALL wifi hotspot would offer any random guest, free throttled courtesy internet access. Something that the ISPs have fervently opposed, something industry has made sure would not happen, at least not by accident. Through hardware design and the dissemination of horror stories. A more competent state would have used this money to just massage the existing infrastructure in opening up to their fellow citizens rather than try and build a parallel infrastructure with brute force money.

I hope they get their shit together and strong arm vendors into a more pro-social private infrastructure, since that essentially free at this point for all intents and purposes.

Yeah I was 100% into the technical details, I live in the EU and doesn't feel the surveillance state emerging quite just yet cheers

Sorry, that wasn't meant to sound so accusatory. I guess I (and probably a lot of other downvoters) are just very frustrated because your assumption doesn't hold true, at least for Germany. I'm very envious of the Internet infrastructure that has been built in Latvia and Romania, for example. I would like to see the same here, but the government already considers 50 MBit DSL to be progressive.

I'm the former prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Tony Blair. Who are you?

You're telling me Internet Cafes can't exist? Yes, they're not available, but they should be. And supporting industry of small business IT Security providers still do business with motels and hotels.

Maybe increase the standards of service requirements, but if not? Yeah, we need to find a way to make free WiFi that doesn't demand you trust the operator will monitor for malicious users, instead of limiting safe internet access to our own homes at best.

Internet cafes, at least in my experience, provide you computers. They don't sell you WiFi access. And I very much doubt they have somebody monitoring network traffic live.

If you're saying they COULD exist, I doubt they're financially viable.

Maybe it's different in the EU then. Here, when cafes had internet, they offered a WiFi password for customers.

I feel like we mean very different things with the term 'Internet cafe'. This is what the term brings to mind for me.

Apparently you're thinking of actual cafes with F&B. Cultural differences I guess.

I still don't see the point. Even if the location offers some sort of 'secure' WiFi, you cannot trust them. Every link on the chain between your device and the server must be considered potentially malicious. The main thing that needs to change is the current leak of sidechannel data needs to be halted.

How, though? If it's inherently unsafe, what's the alternative?

There's nothing 'inherently unsafe' about it. It's untrusted, not unsafe. The software stack just needs to develop more with that in mind. Consider Tor or any VPN as an example of how most if not all the metadata could be hidden.

And I'm glad that the UK left the EU, because now the EU has its own Cuba in front of its shores. Makes life more interesting, doesn't it?