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by mikehawkins
4010 days ago
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Agreed - and echoes a similar case I read about when the folks behind the Ordnance Survey (government agency and makers of truly exceptional maps for outdoor enthusiasts in the UK) proudly showed how they made their data online for a licensing fee that generated about £10m a year. The people they were presenting to? A group of European governments that endorse massive, free access to this sort of data - as a means of spurring innovation and economic growth. Now contrast that with London Mayor Boris Johnson's movie to open up the data for their city bike sharing scheme... released on a Friday, by Monday there were two apps that were slicker and better-developed than the city was planning, plus were now two small businesses. |
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In almost all cases, the marginal cost of producing the 'good' (data) is approximately 0. Furthermore, because infinite copies of data can be made, there is no reason for price rationing. And there's no argument for granting monopoly through artificial scarcity (like there might be with patents and copyright) as the government would have produced the data anyway (often as a byproduct of some other activity e.g. income tax reporting).
Government data is a public good, in the strict economic sense (non-excludable, non-rivalrous).
Setting prices above marginal cost (i.e. 0) causes significant dead-weight loss; it is absolutely inexplicable and inexcusable public policy. This isn't complex economic theory. This is economics 101; you'll find this information in any first-year uni economics textbook (in the 'market failure' chapter). I can only conclude that public servants who do this kind of thing either aren't familiar with extremely basic public economic theory (which is a bad sign), or are actually trying to reduce public welfare (making the public service a rather odd career choice).
Conceptually, charging for government data is equivalent to levying a super-narrowly based and highly inefficient sales tax. The most baffling thing is that it's conservative governments that generally approve these kinds of policies, even though the net effect is to increase the size of government at extremely high efficiency costs.
It's nuts.