It's funny, when I took a tour of the US Geological Survey, the curator of the collection hated Google (which was just a few blocks away). He said Google is great now, with all their maps, which were far more accurate and had better coverage than the USGS.
But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?
He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
At the time we all told him not to worry, Google would never remove data it had collected. Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.
Well, that's the problem with the whole internet. Remember those pages created in the 90s/early 2000s? People thought they were sharing information to the whole world. It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now inaccessible or have been siloed by big corporations. The fact that we allowed corporations to take over the internet made it an inhospitable place for everyone else without corporate backing.
I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The problem seems to be that corporations have made it so easy to do it within their silos that people aren't willing to spend ten hours on something they could do in ten minutes, not realizing that they're going to spend a lot more than ten hours creating content which the company will then vaporize at random whenever they feel like it.
A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries, blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved. Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor comments section.
It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile.
Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant
The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions
From Wikipedia:
Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group
I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth more than a list of any other features.
If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? It would be trivial for celebrities to set up their own websites and share whatever stuff they are sharing. At minimum, they can do this in addition to whatever social media they are on.
It is as if we are all becoming lazy and/or many of us don't realize the harm in giving all our info to half a dozen super mega corps. Most of these mega corps aren't even distributed in the world, they are all American (except tiktok) which is another interesting angle.
This is going to happen (already happening?) in the webapps/apps world too. There are so many no-code tools popping up - most will die, the rest will get acquired by the mega corps. Made a great webapp that is successful? Now you are stuck with bubble/airtable/shopify/whatever. I cannot name many no-code tools that lets you export your application to be hosted independently.
I feel like we are on a path where in a few decades, a dozen or two corporations will control every single aspect of our lives - online especially, and probably offline too.
> If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have?
This is a matter of demand, not capability. It seems most celebs just don't care about setting up their own stuff, and, really, why would they? There are free platforms out there that give them huge amounts of reach. Most of these people just don't need their own website. They may come to regret that decision later, but it's their decision to make.
If a normal guy/gal wants to set up their own domain and website, it's not hard for them to do so, certainly no harder than it was in the 90s/00s, and probably a lot easier. The "no-code" stuff certainly has lock-in disadvantages, but you can simply choose not to use them if you want. Yes, it's more work, but it was always more work to do it yourself, and always will be.
A lot of ordinary people don't post in public, or if they do it's not under their real name, and there is a growing trend of deleting it after a few days. They don't want you to have any data about them at all.
The modern alternative to Usenet is private Facebook groups that never get indexed.
These celebrities will be forgotten as soon as their Instagram account is gone or followers appear to be dead accounts mostly. Some artistically influential will get to the mainstream thanks to their fans hoarding and sharing the data, like all these last century music/film stars who left tons of material in any medium, now digitized and shared/pirated. Although I get a bit worried about p2p sharing as multimedia rental walled gardens got too popular.
The venn diagram of "celebs who are influential" and "fans who are data hoarders" don't overlap as much as you think. The latter tend to be a much nerdier group than the general population.
Yeah, you may be right here. Also Instagram has low entry barrier, where super stars got enormous promotional budgets. Now it is full race to the bottom I would say, commoditization of popularity, massive celebritism :)
There are many projects to make network decentralized such as ipfs (InterPlanetary File System). When exposing these services to public, legality is a big issue.
Plenty of rights would involve in it (copyright, privacy, and so on). Also, all kind of crimes are another issue. It is hard for people to keep monitoring if contents are safe or not.
I think we need a network version of the War of Independence.
If the websites bother to export RSS/ATOM/ActivityPub feeds, they won't need to. They'll just "subscribe" to the stream in their preferred app/webservice, and get aggregated updates about everyone they care about.
Sure, but what about commenting on the post? No one likes creating accounts for different websites in order to post one comment.
It's obvious that things like Twitter and Instagram provide value to celebrities and people who follow them. It's just that there are some serious externalities not factored in.
ActivityPub lets you mark a comment as a "reply" to a post (or any web resource), then all you need is a trackback-like facility to link from the post to comments on it. It doesn't need to be centralized.
> like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications
Yes, please! More and faster.
Centralized services are easy to build, because they offer an obvious location to do some of the things that are tricky to do in a distributed fashion. They are also, by the way, far easier to for small numbers of coordinating people to control, which makes them popular with corporations, authoritarians and sociopaths.
Decentralized services will rarely be the New Shiny that attracts all the 14 year olds for a few minutes. But, unlike email, you never hear anyone whining that Myspace won't go away.
We have tons of decentralized platforms. The amount is not the problem. The problem is the user experience. For users who don’t care about anything behind the scenes and only cares about the experience, why would they go out of their way to figure out Mastodon when Facebook has a one-step signup process?
The reason central platforms win is because they have to be dead simple to use in order to attract any users. Decentralized platforms get their initial users because of how cool the technology is, but those people (people like me and you) aren’t UX experts and don’t prioritize UX.
It has to be easier than the central platform, and the central platform has the benefit of millions/billions of dollars to throw at it. Which means the decentralized platforms have to work even harder to overcome that. It’s not impossible, but it does require engineers to overcome their desire to build cool things and instead focusing on building a user experience that’s better than what Facebook/Twitter/etc can provide.
Joining a Mastodon server is just as simple as signing up to Facebook. The difference is that no single Mastodon instance has centralized control over their users; you always get the option of signing up elsewhere, or using your own instance.
This is what I would have thought, but I've heard from more than one friend who was frustrated by having to choose an instance in the first place. What makes one better or worse than another? What if I choose wrong? What if I need to move?
This isn't difficult, per se, but it's not as easy as signing up for Twitter for the simple dumb reason that you don't need to make that choice. And the concerns about "wrong choices" aren't entirely unfounded; the first Mastodon instance I signed up for was effectively abandoned by its sysadmin. The decentralization still makes it hard to search for new users to follow compared to Twitter (checking right this moment, when I click on someone I follow to see who they follow, it only shows me people they follow on the same instance); depending on the Mastodon client I'm using, it can actually be a little hard to follow someone even when I find them if they're not on the same instance I am. Again, technically none of this is super difficult, but for a user who isn't philosophically committed to the fediverse, tiny little frustrations start to add up quickly.
Most public mastodon instances usually have an about page that describes what their intended audience is. You can also look through the public timeline to see what users are saying first before signing up. If you aren't sure, pick a larger general instance.
Despite all that, in my opinion you'll probably get more mileage out of joining an instance run by someone you know and trust.
Well, you can see how that's a bit of a bigger ask than "go to Twitter.com and click SIGN UP," right? :)
People really, really want to argue that decentralization of social networks doesn't make things harder, but eventually the defense always shifts to "well, you have to be willing to jump through a few hoops if you believe in the advantages of a decentralized/indie internet, which you totally should," because the truth is that the decentralized way does make things harder. Personally, I do believe in the advantages of the IndieWeb, and I do think it's worth jumping through those hoops. I just think we need to acknowledge those hoops exist, and always be thinking about ways we can reduce the friction for people who say "I like all those ideas in theory, but in practice it's too frustrating."
It’s the “signing up elsewhere or using your own instance” that’s the problem. You’re joining a Mastodon server and if you want to go to another server you have to actually move things. It takes actual effort.
It seems like the Mastodon developers look at email and think “if it works for email it’ll work here” and don’t understand that people deal with email because they have to, not because they want to. I don’t want to have to change my email address when I switch providers and I don’t want to have to move all my stuff if my favorite Mastodon server decides to shut down.
That’s not a solution that’s just another problem. It’s bad user experience.
> and if you want to go to another server you have to actually move things. It takes actual effort.
Not sure how that's worse than something like Facebook, where you literally don't get that option. If you want your asserted identity to be reasonably secure and easy to assess for other users, you have to find a trusted host or do your own hosting; that's no different from any other service.
This is what I’m talking about with developers not understanding users. I even said “users don’t care what’s behind the scenes”. Any normal user who is looking to leave Facebook wants Facebook The Product but not Facebook The Company. They don’t care about hosting or asserting identity. They don’t want options, they want a product.
People use email because it’s the best communication system existing. If someone doesn’t want to change his address he creates his own self-hosted mail server. Or just use his own domain name when using email service with thord party email providers. Email system is amazing, the issues with ux are in fact minimal, almost non-existent.
Even if self-hosted email was easy, I don't find it to be a great idea.
I ran my own for a while using mail-in-a-box but ended up moving to fastmail because I didn't trust myself to maintain the setup. I need my email system to just work and that's likely the same for the majority of people.
(I validated that lack of trust in myself even with fastmail by not realizing for almost 3 days that I let my domain expire, thus causing emails to bounce with no way of me knowing that was happening)
Ok so make mastodon as easy as gmail. I can use Gmail.com or my own domain. Let me have same flexibility with my internet identity. I wish the USPS had gotten into the official Internet identity game. One place to receive legal emails, store my private keys, public keys etc. protected by law.
Too bad spammers and big corps broke that one as well. Maybe if it worked as a publush subscribe system (MQTT) instead where the sender was responsible for storing and distributing content, then the spam problem would be somewhat fixed?
A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational.
Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one.
Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful.
Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.
> A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational.
I like trains, and I started a website back in 2001 for people to share their photos. It was reasonably popular. One of my drivers was taxonomy and archiving of images for future enthusiasts.
Today, it's dead. People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure. The comments - from people who worked on the railways, knew people involved - useful to historians of the future, are fantastic. But if you can't find them, what point?
I get why Facebooks succeeded. For my site, I was a total geek: why would I dirty the site with anything social? Well, look who's laughing now.
>People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure.
Not even a week if you consider the target audience for what's posted as opposed to the poster. Algorithmic sorting and infinity scrolling have pretty much eliminated the ability to go back and look at something you saw a few days ago (unless the algorithm decides to boost it back into your feed).
I haven’t seen your train site, but the kind of content I imagine you produce would be, in my mind, akin to a reference book.
By contrast, Facebook is at best like a magazine, at worst a radio phone-in about trains.
Reference works in the form of websites have amazing value in and of themselves. I don’t think they need to be measured by social eyeballs when they attain an outright high level of quality.
I happen to be particularly fond of a reference website that is a taxonomy and history of British traffic lights:
> Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Newsfeed is RSS/Atom.
Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss.
The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like.
Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat.
RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.
Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Because these compete with the interests of browser vendors, interests which finance a degree of development that dominates and ultimately stifles independent efforts.
Remember that Google pitched Google+ as an "identity service". They're now accomplishing this through Android, Doubleclick, GA, Gmail, and ReCaptcha, far more effectively. And sell ads on it.
Facebook isn't going to pay for social integration development by Mozilla: Zuck wants that pie to himself.
Channel monopolies would prefer RSS died and browsers (or apps) served their specific feed directly and exclusively.
More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
I went through exactly this thinking recently when I wanted to setup a blog for myself (and migrate an existing one off of WordPress). I tried my best (and I think I succeeded) in ensuring that I am not locked into one vendor, and it was pretty much free.
Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is.
Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2]
I think that's only half of it. The other half is that it's easier for consumers to find content in the silos of the large corporations than content that exists outside of them.
Yep, it’s even worse. There are some things that don’t have a definitive answer, like many aspects of CoViD. Some pages with what I would categorize as “inquiring” get removed just because they don’t line up with the WHO. This isn’t about questioning vaccines, but rather the unsettled questions around this new disease. Just gets banned... it’s not like I have a stake in that fight _other_ than dismay at private censorship of opinions that don’t toe a given line. It’s rather frightening.
But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...
Why do you feel that it was the job of "corporations" to preserve and archive of every page forever?
In my country, all physical books and magazines which are published must be submitted to the government in X copies. The government then keeps an archive.
With webpages, the problem of obtaining X copies never existed. Why couldn't the government have archived webpages like it always did with books?
It is not that it is their job. The problem is the mismatch between the broader public understanding of the lifetime of "a webpage" and reality, when said "webpage" is inside a walled silo (and maybe even when it isn't).
I guess I don't see why anyone would expect their webpage to keep being published indefinitely with no contract or ongoing payment. Not many other things in the world work like that.
Services provided by a company typically don't survive the end of the contract to provide that service. If the company itself goes bankrupt, all services cease to be provdided immediately.
Typically the only organisations which can credibly commit to providing a service for more than a few years/decades is the government of a country, a well-funded foundation with a clearly specified mission, or similar.
I believe you are misrepresenting the situation. No one expects corporations to archive and preserve all data, especially not data that they are not associated with.
However, if they create a monopoly on that data they have an obligation to preserve it, especially in the case of a corporation outright aquiring data instead of simply "out competing" for data. And as everyone mentions, of course they are in no way legally obligated to do so, but they are by any reasonable standard ethically obligated.
I do think that the government could and should archive data, but there is currently no system in place for doing so and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. Corporations would simply have to maintain the data that they already have.
I'd argue this is a feature not a bug. The internet is a protocol for communication, not archival or retention. Any notion of persistence is owned by nodes in the network. Retrieval from an "archive" over the internet comes in the form of communication. The web introduced hypertext, and a protocol for exchanging hypertext, on top of this communication protocol. But again any notion of persistence of hypertext, and the "links" between hypertext documents, is the responsibility of the nodes in the network.
They were sharing information with the whole world, but in an ephemeral medium.
The web, and internet, is not an inhospitable place for anyone without corporate backing. You can host a somewhat reliable service on a raspberry pi over your home internet connection.
The issue is is that a web page only lasts as long as its funding does: private sites are great, but someone still has to pay for the server and, when they die, it’s probably going to just vanish, unless the internet archive got it.
Seems like a fundamental truth of Capitalism: privatization and ultimate destruction of anything that can be monetized. Certain things are impossible without money and to make money to have to generate or consume something which leads to a never-ending cycle.
I seem to have a distrust of corps imprinted in my brain since birth and had never fell for their candies/propaganda. All my stuff is always on my own servers with shadowing of course.
> He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
Jeez, that's horrifying. Literally just giving public assets to private corporations.
I believe the original author meant that Google doesn't have to turn over aerial scans that Google commissioned (not the scans they took of the USGS files).
Furthermore, I'd be shocked if Google just kept the original copies that the USGS gave them.
If getting it takes connections or prestige, then yes.
If any entity with a plausible use case could and still can get that data at the cost of the copy, I don't see why not. The whole "copying does not deprive the original owner" meme applies particularly to such public assets.
At a fundamental level, my complaint isn't about money or access, it's about ownership.
Yes, money and access are important. Yes, ownership has money and access implications. But ownership in itself is fundamental, and the money and access problems usually don't immediately follow the ownership problems, because if they did, nobody would give up ownership in the first place.
I've said it before and I'll it say again: corporations don't have the right to "innocent until proven guilty". We don't have to wait for corporations to do something wrong to do something about it. A lot of people on Hacker News seem to have this idea that we should wait to regulate until businesses follow incentives to the point of doing great harm, and then once they're when they do great harm, we should just say, "Oh it's not their fault, they were just following incentives."
I don't accept this. It's obvious that taking publicly owned data and making it privately owned will lead to Google placing that data behind a paywall, an ad-wall, or a simple loss of access if Google feels they can't monetize access. Even if Google maintains a relationship with the USGS such that we always have access, there's no reason for the USGS to spend our tax dollars to pay rent to Google as a middleman. We don't have to wait for Google to follow incentives to that point--we can see where this is going and we don't have to pretend we don't.
I assume the USGS still holds the same data, no less accessible than before.
So, if Google has put their copy of the data behind a wall, or deleted it, it's no less accessible than if Google had never been allowed to make that copy.
> I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has.
1. A corporation is not a person. Corporations don't have rights, except inasmuch as the people within the corporation have rights.
2. The problem isn't that Google has access to the data, it's that USGS and the rest of the world no longer have access to the data, except on Google's terms.
The supreme court also decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves were not included under the constitution and could never be citizens.
The supreme court was wrong on racism, and it's wrong on corporate personhood.
What's right and wrong is a purely human construct and changes over time. The point was that, currently, in the eyes of the law, corporations hold many of the same rights as individuals. This could change, but would require special circumstances not considered previously or a change to the law by congress.
Corporations aren't people. I can't get married to Google. If you can point to specific precedence of corporations being given access to certain data on grounds of their personhood then your argument makes sense but just because corporations are considered like people in the context of speech doesn't mean that applies literally everywhere else.
Corporations aren’t people, but from a legal perspective, they have some rights in common with persons, which is why you often hear statements saying they are.
> But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
That was poor negotiation by USGS Solicitor's Office. Libraries participating in google digitization programs negotiated to keep copies of their scanned materials in the Hathi Trust Digital Library https://www.hathitrust.org
You act like the Director of the USGS was acting in good faith. It's pretty likely that Eric Schmidt, or similar, already worked things out with high-level officials within the government and the USGS Director was not given any real decision making capabilities.
There are laws for book publishers, requiring that they send copies to your local government's central library. In the US it's the library of congress. Some of the books they don't keep, but they do filter them by which books are important and which aren't. Maybe the same should be done for "viral" posts, such arial scans, and other data deemed important.
In Germany the national library is also required by law to take care of digital ("körperlose Werke") media.
They are still figuring out what a good way for archival of those is and are quite selective in choice what they archive, but they plan to expand on that
Electronic works in the U.S. fall within the mandatory deposit statute, but then are excused by Copyright Office administrative rules. However, it seems they've slightly narrowed the electronic works exception (first in 2010, and tentatively for 2020) since the last time I looked: https://www.copyright.gov/rulemaking/ebookdeposit/
I didn't know that LoC has any discretion regarding keeping items mandatorily deposited for copyright registration. Do you have more information on this?
The USGS is currently in the middle of an 8-year 1.1-billion-dollar program to develop a nationwide digital elevation model from aerial lidar. The data, which is freely accessible, is hosted on AWS. Cute story though. The hackernewses are going to eat it up.
USGS is in the process of collecting that data right now, it's not from the archives, and DEM is different from USGS aerials (which are photographs) and run out of a different USGS office. This is sort of irrelevant.
Making digital data publicly available is pretty new for USGS. Just a few years ago archived aerial imagery had to be ordered by mail and it was a pretty lengthy process. Topo maps (the earlier equivalent of the DEM data to which you refer) were generally ordered on paper as well up to five or so years ago, but they're in a lot more popular use so more third parties got into the business of distributing them. I've relied moderately heavily on both for some of my research and was a very painful process until just recently to get anything older than current. In the meantime, yes, Google had it all at some point, but mostly stopped using it or providing it because they obtained better quality imagery.
Fortunately USGS now has a slippy map for topo and an admittedly rather clunky ESRI query service for aerials.
USGS has been providing free public access to DEM data for ages. The SRTM has been available via FTP since at least 15 years ago when I first started using it to render hillshaded maps. There's not a secret handshake needed.
and the DEM has always been in a native digital format. The whole problem here is that the aerials and conventional maps are not, they're on paper and film and fiche. It takes a lot of time and money to get it digitized and available and USGS was not able to do that for a long time. You could argue that Google's generous offer to digitize the EROS archives contributed to the delays on this.
Keep in mind that when we talk about the EROS archives we're talking about data that goes back to the 1930s and earlier for some product types.
For a long time I got the topo maps from the website of a state government bureau that had conveniently run them through their own large-format scanner and posted the TIFFs - USGS didn't get around to it for years after. It's hard to blame them too much as they had a shoestring budget.
Actually, for amusement value, that state agency appears to have removed the TIFFs from their website and now says that you can order the topo maps by mail for $8 a piece, which is what I used to have to do. I wonder if USGS got mad at them, which is a bit ironic since they don't mention that USGS themselves only recently started offering them online for free. For additional amusement value EarthExplorer, the fairly new service that lets you retrieve aerials online, has a banner up that downloads are intermittently broken and indeed I can't get it to work at the moment.
Really I'm struggling with your statement about digital distribution being new for the USGS. We're talking about an agency that ran a finger service to inform people about recent earthquakes!
I had to order some maps over Antarctica by fax a year ago. The USGS had a functional webshop, but it only served the US, everybody else had to fill out this form including debit card data and send it over. It turned ou my uni actually still had one (1) functional fax machine.
The planet should be managed for the centuries, plural.
But we're just not smart enough to understand that, never mind make it happen.
Instead we prefer to cling to the bizarre delusion that billions of individuals with competing interests will somehow spontaneously self-organise into the best of all possible worlds.
That is indeed pretty much what it says on the tin.
However, to be fair, it has always been the most greedy and self-interested, with already the most disproportionate power to rig the game in their favor, that have been most vocally advocating this system. No surprise there, of course.
What fascinates me is how a majority of people, who certainly do not personally benefit from that system, have been made to believe that they do. Sure, political corruption, cultural indoctrination/propaganda, horrendous general education, and I can think of a few more .. but still I've always been amazed, how it appears to have canceled even basic logic reasoning among so many.
Who knows, maybe one day, it will turn out to not just "correlate" with an addiction to carbs/sugars, of which the country has plenty of problems with too. Junkies have always been easy to manipulate.
Until then, at least it still gives some hope that a growing number of people now realize that this system just doesn't work as it is advertised.
And it's not even true. At least here in Europe (I can't comment on the US as I've never visited), Google Maps is really poor.
It's fine when you travel by car, but when I'm hiking through the hills I'm just walking through an empty square on Google Maps. Volunteer-driven OpenStreetMap is MUCH better. And there the data is actually open and safeguarded.
Governments should support that kind of project instead of corporate privacy-invading playtoys like Google Maps.
In another life, I was a land surveyor and I did a lot of LiDAR work as well as heavy use of USGS data. Almost anybody except the most blinkered in that industry would have seen this coming, I think. It's just one more data point that convinces me that Google should be broken up or at least not allowed to silo previously public categories of data.
I had a similar almost to the letter conversation when I did some web work for a much smaller GIS firm back in the day, but wanted to add that in my experience this isn't just a google thing but an issue with governments and outsourcing in general.
Anecdotally, a close relative (and many others in her institute) designed entire curricula of learning modules for a government-owned nationwide technical college, back when online learning was newish, ~20 years ago (I think back when SCORM was fresh). These were tightly integrated into the traditional in-class offerings. A couple of years later a "trim the fat" government slashed internal capabilities and outsourced all "IT" hosting, management, etc.
All of the online learning modules (which would have cost millions in man-hours to develop) were literally handed over as "content" to a company who to this day offers them back to her institute under per-student licenses (that far exceed any "hosting" costs of these basically static resources) over a decade later. This company also profits off licensing to an array of pop-up online "institutes" that don't even approach the pedagogical context needed to ensure quality education outcomes from these resources.
Like a comedy of errors, from time to time some lecturer at her college will want to ask some question about the materials, their boss directs them to the company support (which is a paid service), after the issue escalates through the support tiers and they realise they need the expert knowledge of the author she'll get an email with the question, a process that can take days or weeks when the lecturer could have walked into the office next door and asked her directly, if the company hadn't stripped all author credits from the materials.
If the company decides to shift business models, or goes out of business, or is acquired and scuttled, these assets get blown to the winds.
There's a lot I could say about this situation, but essentially governments in general seem to devalue their assets at taxpayer expense, the IP of these assets could have been better handled rather than just giving it directly to the first company to win the contract all those years ago.
I think most of us are young enough to live up to the point where we would look into the mirror asking ourselves what did we do 20 years ago and nobody will really remember because you know,a few bits here,a few bits there,and all it disappeared...
It sounds awful that Google has the best mapping data in the US. In the UK Google's data is awful, worse than OpenStreetMap and much worse than Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency.
The underlying problem here might as well be considered a fundamental shortcoming of pure/fundamental capitalism. I make no claims about the value of alternatives, or even if there are any (better ones, that is).
Anything that is (no longer) of commercial value will be "phased out" and dismantled/destroyed. One might still stretch it a bit, by arguing that the commercial value of something can include its future potential value. But I personally know not a single commercial companies that ever choose that over short term cost reductions and "profit optimizations".
Luckily, there are governments who acknowledge this shortcoming and build structures to compensate for it. But when governments decide to leave (almost) everything to commercial markets, then the importance of anything and everything can and will only be measured by it's commercial (contemporary) value/profitability.
People have every right to vote for and support such a system. But then don't complain, when all that you will get is only what such system supports/provides.
He said Google is great now, with all their maps, which were far more accurate and had better coverage than the USGS...But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?
Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.
If you would've asked me back when Google was new, and we all believed in "Don't be Evil," I would never have thought that Big Tech would end up being the Ministry of Truth and The Memory Hole.
But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?
He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
At the time we all told him not to worry, Google would never remove data it had collected. Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.