It doesn't potentially open anything new. According to the court's decision, boat captains must already report that information:
> charter-boat owners are already required to report all of the information that the Government says the GPS-tracking requirement is designed to collect. That is, before going on a trip, charter-boat owners must tell the Government the type of trip (fishing or otherwise), and if it is a fishing trip, they must also tell the Government where they are going, how long they expect the trip will take, and when and where they expect to return. 50 C.F.R. ยง 622.26(b)(6).
Also, the decision concerns charter boat fishing, not commercial fishing.
Control access to the information so that it is less likely to escape to their competitors. They are in competition with each other and no one wants the other to know where they are making their best money.
The real problem is that when a fishery is in decline due to over-fishing, we have no effective way of detecting that condition until there is a serious problem and local stocks, which may be migratory species anyway that are only available seasonally, are near the point where they can't recover.
Each captain sees a small part of the elephant and to him, that elephant is there, it is healthy, and it is available for exploitation. When they go back to harbor they compare notes and it could take a lot of time for any of them to acknowledge that catch levels of some species are down and that they are having to go farther out or to locate new areas that have not been hit as hard.
I don't see a problem with a government agency with the responsibility of safeguarding the health of offshore assets like fish stocks and habitat having precise tools to allow them to determine where the fish are being taken. If this agency did not exist then over-fishing would be the norm as each charter boat did the best to maximize the fun for the clients until they had fished themselves out of a job as the fisheries collapse. In the absence of effective regulation, everyone does their own thing with no regard for anything except maximizing their own profitability. This is the way (of the world).
The first thing I do when fishing a new area is book a half day drift boat trip and mark all the spots they fished on my marine gps app. It's stupid easy (if not free) to find where charter fisherman fish.
> charter-boat owners are already required to report all of the information that the Government says the GPS-tracking requirement is designed to collect. That is, before going on a trip, charter-boat owners must tell the Government the type of trip (fishing or otherwise), and if it is a fishing trip, they must also tell the Government where they are going, how long they expect the trip will take, and when and where they expect to return. 50 C.F.R. ยง 622.26(b)(6).
Also, the decision concerns charter boat fishing, not commercial fishing.