alt Hacker NewsOperating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
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Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
I work in this space. The load on private APIs -- and the management costs in general of reselling government data -- are utterly dwarfed by the upstream costs borne by the government.
The public __already__ pays for Google, The Weather Company, Apple, and really __everybody__ -- down to your local weather person and surf report -- to use weather data on a massive scale.
Government weather data underpins huge chunks of our modern, globalized economy. It should absolutely be better funded and even allowed to directly distribute data to the public and industry. NOAA and NASA et al could be given 10x their current allocation of tax money and you and I would still be getting a great deal.
I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.