[geo-discuss] quasi-public goods

Sun Jul 24 14:10:01 UTC 2005

I dug out the 1999 paper which the OS website quotes everywhere on the
subject of how OS data 'underpins 100 billion worth of business' (for
which read, OS sell some data to companies which have throughput of
75-125 billion between them)
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/aboutus/reports/oxera/

i was fascinated to see the Jamie Love connection in the citing of
government-collected spatial information as a "quasi-public good",
which appears in other papers that reference this one, e.g.
http://geoinfo.uneca.org/sdiafrica/Chap_HTML/07Financing.htm

thoughts:
- the ideas of non-excludability on which the definition of public
  good is built don't seem to apply to digital goods. All digital
  goods tend towards being quasi-private in the current IP climate

- if NIMSA funded data collection is clearly separable from other geodata
  collection, and *is* classified as a public good, then surely public
  access to that information should also be considered a public good?

i am not an economist, and the lingo is intermittently penetrable. 
i thought the papers might catch someone's interest though.

-jo 