InformationWeek has a useful piece about the continuing struggles over Bill S.786 and the National Weather Service’s provision of free meteorological data. This sort of tussle, the piece rightly points out, is historically predictable:
Efforts to control public information that profits the private sector are hardly new. Commercial providers of patent and trademark information opposed making the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database available online, a fight they lost in 1998. And in 1993, responding to pressure from public interest groups, the Securities and Exchange Commission made its Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval System available online free of charge, a service Mead Data (subsequently purchased by Reed Elsevier and renamed Lexis-Nexis), under government contract, previously offered for a fee.
Legislation designed to prohibit government-funded municipal wireless networks can be seen in a similar light.
These are interesting & important issues when every database is, in principle, exposing an API over the Internet. Where do you draw the line with respect to government providing services and/or data that compete with private providers? Keep in mind that in the NWS case many (most?) for-profit providers in the weather business use NWS data.
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