[yellowbkpk]

It boils down to the fact that the United States does not have (public domain) knowledge of every address in the country.

The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats (Zipcodes, addresses, delivery routes, for example). The Census has very complete knowledge of every address, but won't give it up because it's illegal (see Title 13 of the US Code). There is an ongoing attempt by the DOT to collect a National Address Database (https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database) by collecting information from the address assigning authorities (usually county governments), but it's incomplete and unlikely to ever be complete because of holdout/underfunded local governments.

There are several address datasets that are private (Google has a fairly complete one, FedEx/UPS probably have the most complete, TomTom, CostQuest, etc.). I started https://openaddresses.io/ to try and collect them (NAD is based off this idea) into an open-licensed dataset.

The broadband companies have records that say "this address is connected to this network, which could theoretically have this service level", but (a) they won't/can't tell you where they think the address is and (b) won't spend the time to match their address string format with the government's address because both are private data.

Finally, without the address -> location data, even if we could get broadband providers to tell us what service is available at each address, we couldn't put that service level on a map because we don't know where the address is.

----

The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncov...

[geraldhh]

> It boils down to the fact that the United States does not have (public domain) knowledge of every address in the country.

i suspect licensing problems but this sounds too absurd to be true. as you said, there are multiple companies that have said dataset, at least one is under goverment control, saying nothing of the biggest defense/intelligence complex in the world which probably has coordinates of every address on the planet.

[EMIRELADERO]

> The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats

Why does the USPS need a moat? It's not a private, profit-seeking enterprise

[yellowbkpk]

It's public and private. It still has to make money to survive because it doesn't get much in the way of tax money.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...

[skybrian]

Seems like the federal government could buy the data and put in the public domain, thus funding the Post Office (a bit)?

[eyegor]

A major political party and several large corporations are opposed to increasing federal funds to the post office. Unless you can spin it as national defense, notable federal funding for any group is unlikely.

[ssl-3]

"Education is key to every aspect of national defense, and broadband maps are a critical element of seeing that our future soldiers, laborers, and engineers have the resources they need in order to be the best and brightest -- on the battlefield, in the factory, and in the office designing the next generation of war machine."

[whiterknight]

The other major political party likes its make work program for its voter base, so it’s unlikely to accept a one time payment vs guarantees of organizational stability.

[KennyBlanken]

You...are aware that the US military is a rural welfare program, right? It's designed to suck in skilless, poorly educated rural (and to a lesser degree, urban) young men...and to employ adults making munitions, gear, vehicles, and weapons systems.

For example, just about the only reason Susan Collins is still a congressional representative is because she reliably keeps defense spending rolling into the Portsmouth naval shipyard which in turn is fed by a large network of suppliers.

[akira2501]

When we did "Remote Encoding" for the USPS one of the early common "modes" was asking for Zipcode + 4 + Last 2 of House Number. The administrators explained that this 11 digit number was enough to uniquely identify most deliverable addresses "boxes" in the United States.

[maartenh]

Wow, that's quite different from the Netherlands. Here, we have the BAG, Basis Administratie Gebouwen (Base Administration Buildings).

Muniplicities are the data owners, but data is also collated nationally.

See [0] for a viewer of this public data.

Also, all our surveying/road data is managed in a similar fashion, and this is regularly imported in e.g. openstreetmap.

[0] https://bagviewer.kadaster.nl/lvbag/bag-viewer/?zoomlevel=1

[systemtest]

I like BAG. It is a shame that our WOZ-waarde (municipal home valuation) isn't a similar centralised system but that every municipality does their own thing. Similar for zoning, charge points and traffic signage / traffic data.

[aidenn0]

> The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons

I don't know if it's still the case, but ISP's tools for address offerings were unreliable enough that realtors have suggested getting an install estimate in writing if the seller didn't have broadband.

[crotchfire]

No major ISP will give you an install commitment in writing.

I wouldn't buy a house based on a mere estimate of the availability of something this critical.

It's a gigantic clusterfuck.

The realtors know they can't fix this, but they can't exactly let it impede the source of their paycheck either. I absolutely would not take advice of any kind on internet access from a realtor.

[tareqak]

I don’t know if the following is related, but I find it very strange that title insurance is necessary. I would assume that both municipal and state governments would know exactly who owns what piece of property/natural resource rights/air rights/other property-related right at the click of a button.

[aidenn0]

> I don’t know if the following is related, but I find it very strange that title insurance is necessary. I would assume that both municipal and state governments would know exactly who owns what piece of property/natural resource rights/air rights/other property-related right at the click of a button.

They only need to know well enough to send a tax bill. If someone is paying property taxes, that's good enough for the municipality. It's not good enough when people start suing each other, at which point the municipality very much does not want to own the liability for any mistakes.

Consider the simple situation in which Alice sells property to Bob, without revealing (intentionally or mistakenly) that Carol has a lien against the property. If Carol comes to collect and Alice cannot pay, then Carol now also has a claim to the property.

Things get even more complicated with fraud. Lets say that Eve manages to fraudulently record a transfer from Alice to Eve, and then sells the property to Bob. Bob has not committed fraud, but Alice also should own it. In systems in which the government registry is indefeasible, then Bob owns it; Alice may recover money (see above why municipalities don't want to be liable), but not the property (had Eve been caught before selling the property then the fraud would have invalidated her claim, but Bob hasn't committed any fraud).

[crotchfire]

Of course they know. They also wisely refuse to accept responsibility for the reprecussions of being wrong.

This is the whole point of title insurance. You aren't paying for the answer. You're paying somebody to accept massive liability if the answer is wrong.

There is something called the "Torrens Title System" where the government does accept some part of this liability, subject to a huge raft of weird terms and conditions that the legislature can change unilaterally after the fact. It has only been successful in countries lacking constitutional limits on eminent domain, since in those places landowners are already subject to legislative whims anyways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title

It has been a flop in every US jurisdiction that has tried it.

When given a choice between transferring responsibility to somebody who can be sued (states can't) and gives you a contract, vs someone who can't and won't, it turns out people prefer the former.

[Solvency]

I like the part where we're expected to just believe these agencies/departments aren't sharing and circulating address data internally, simply because they say they aren't. As if they've never misled and outright lied to the public thousands of documented times in the past.