Most e-government services commence with, "Type in your postal code and find your local representatives/public services". With geographic data free of licensing costs, free services can be built quickly and cheaply. Local organising, campaign planning, election monitoring services enhanced with geographic data and maps can be built on a grassroots level.
In the UK, it costs £2000 p/a to license a simple postcode lookup service. The licensing of political boundary data (which enables simple services such as representative lookup to be built) is not published by the National Mapping Agency. It is currently impossible to build these services on a free or grassroots basis in the EU. The proposed INSPIRE Directive will keep it that way.
Government-collected data licensing costs are a form of regressive taxation on Small to Medium Enterprises. The cost overhead will make it much harder to compete with large companies offering Location Based Services.
Open Source GIS tools and standards are being taken up in the developing world, as a very cost-effective way of establishing a national spatial data infrastructure. For non-profits and enthusiasts to develop this software, free access to geographic data is essential. This is why all these projects originate in the US, and EU research students have to work with US data.
The preamble to the proposed Directive estimates that INSPIRE will incur spemding of between 3.6 and 5.4M EU per member country, and that the potential return on investment per member country will be 27-42M EU per year. There is not accounting or reseach history for these figures
These are false profits: a significant proportion of these licensing fees will be paid by local government authorities, other public sector agencies and publically funded research bodies.
The Geographic Information Systems industry is undergoing a revolution. In the last few years home bandwidth and storage have allowed casual users to do home GIS for the first time. An impressive array of Free and Open Source and low-cost Commercial GIS packages are appearing on the market. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are buying into the web-based spatial information market. Location based services are promoting a revival in the ICT and Telecoms industry in the US. Free availability of state-collected geographic data is enabling this through low cost of R'n'D and lack of licensing constraints for web- and mobile- based locative services.
Very large companies may welcome INSPIRE, as it could provide a single point of negotiation to license data from 25 different government agencies. No-one else will feel these benefits apart from government itself. There is no price that is fair to both an elementary school student and a large agribusiness company
The GML (Geography Markup Language) and WMS/WFS (Web Mapping / Feature Service) standards on which the INSPIRE framework is intended to be built, are still changing and are not proven. They are not 'in the world', and part of that problem is the lack of public domain geographic data which can be distributed freely. They cannot describe many components of public sector information which have a spatial aspect and need to be considered part of a proposed Framework.
By seeking to legislate partially-understood and partially-supported standards from the top down, in isolation from developments in web mapping, the EC risks enormous wasted investment.
Access to the raw data is essential for spatial analysis and mapping applications. The legal obligations under the INSPIRE proposal to build 'viewing' and e-commerce applications for spatial data, will incur significant and wasteful cost that could be obviated by making the data free for download.
In recent years, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Japan, inspired by the economic and social benefits arising from the US free geographic data policy, have begun to open up their national mapping and gazetteer data free of license into the public domain. This KPMG Canada study on the Canadian Spatial Data Infrastructure was commissioned in response to a report indicating that the consequences [of cost recovery] for businesses are higher marginal costs, lower research and development investments and threatened marginal products. The results for consumers are negative: higher prices and reduced products and services. The overall economic consequences... are fewer jobs, reduced economic output by almost $2.6 billion and a lower gross domestic product..
The INSPIRE consultation process has been unrepresentative. It has been rushed through to Directive status in a manner which exceeds the remit of the Commission. The needs of industry and user groups have not been consulted. The proposed leglislation has been created in response to the concerns of public-sector national mapping agencies and the machinery of government, not the needs of citizens nor the needs of industry
,It should be noted that much of the current cost recovery practise are adversely affecting other government departments. Based on our sample, over $4.2M (40%) of the $11M generated in revenues from the sale of digital geospatial data is between government departments. [KPMG Canada]
Quite certainly, the high cost of some geospatial data files in Canada is limiting academic research and effective public sector planning, as well as potentially curtailing commercial development. [ibid]