The Economic Case For Open Public Geodata

• Location is a part of virtually every human activity
• It's literally everywhere
• The more information economic players have about location in general, the more efficient their activity can be
• Cost recovery raises a bar to accessing state-collected location information, and hence generates unnecessary economic friction
• This same bar inhibits technological innovation in cartography and spatial analysis
• Hypothesis: (value of economic efficiency from widespread access to geodata + technology) > (cost of collecting and distributing the geodata)
• Also, some things can't be entrusted to the market